Interface software for the MIT IAP "coffee can" RADAR.

Adapted from the course's MATLAB post-processing scripts.

candar is a real-time plotting utility for displaying both left/right channels (CPI trigger channel and the radar CPI channel), leveraging pyqtgraph.

• Top plot is trigger channel
• Bottom plot is CPI channel (red=signal, green=CFAR threshold)

• A RADAR system as documented on the MIT IAP course
  • In general, can be any radar system that interfaces to the processing via stereo audio, with L=trigger and R=pulse signal. Some tuning of software may be required for triggers not at 20 ms intervals (some stuff is still hardcoded).
  • Many laptops don't record stereo audio through the audo port itself (microphones are normally mono, e.g., Apple Macbook Pros use the 3.5mm audio for stereo output + mono input). You can purchase USB audio adapters to convert the IAP course's single audio connector output into a USB input suitable for a laptop (example).

• Python 3
• Numpy
• Scipy
• Matplotlib
• PyAudio
• PyQtGraph

Some environment setup (since I don't have a setup.py yet):

• Add the lib folder to your PYTHONPATH
• Add the bin folder to your PATH

To read from PyAudio device:

$ candar pyaudio

To read from recorded .wav file:

$ candar playback samples/running_outside_20ms.wav

For full list of options:

$ candar -h