search

bitsforbrains / mmwave

Python module for capturing/processing MMWave data from the TI DCA1000EVM Data Capture Card
14 stars 5 forks source link

Ask for help with DCA1000EVM data capture problem #2

Open fake12517 opened 4 years ago

fake12517 commented 4 years ago

We sent the command to start the capture through MMWave Studio, but the studio could not capture the data for a long time, and the collection would stop after a period of time, so we could only achieve the data capture of about one minute. I wonder if you could provide a better solution or a more detailed way of doing it?It would be great if we could get a better solution.

slash31 commented 4 years ago

Hello - I replied directly to your email as well.

I wrote this software in a very short period of time to help a friend who was using this card with a project. His goal was to capture raw data from the card before it was processed with TI's off-loaded transformations (e.g. FFT) to validate his own algorithms. We also had a lot of trouble capturing the data because MMWave studio was running on MS Windows and obtained exclusive/locked access to the UDP port. I wrote another small promiscuous UDP listener/forwarder application (https://github.com/bitsforbrains/mabel) - it should be run on the same system as MMWave studio and will forward the UDP traffic to another host running the listener. We were running MMWave Studio and Mabel on MS Windows, and the listener on a Linux host.

Overall, this setup did not work reliably. We would start Mabel, then MMWave, then try to run the code. Sometimes MMWave would just hang, and everything (the card, MMWave Studio, everything) would have to be restarted and reloaded. It was very frustrating.

My suggestion would be to use a network switch that has the capability for creating a "span" port (mirrors the traffic going to one port to another port on the switch):

                                   /--------- switchport 2 ---------> MS Windows host running MMWave Studio
DCA1000EVM -> switchport 1 -> switch  
                                   \-----switchport 3 (mirror)------> linux host running mmwave capture application

This way there is nothing that will interfere with MMWave Studio, and you will still be able to see/capture all of the raw traffic coming out of the DCA1000EVM.

Good luck!