Overview
A friend needed a way to detect and log people moving through a space without cameras — radar sees presence and motion through the dark, through cover, and without recording anyone’s face. This is the platform I built for it: an ESP32 drives a 60 GHz pulsed-coherent radar module, extracts detection peaks, and streams them to a server that stores and visualizes the movement over time.
The stack
- Firmware: a PlatformIO/Arduino client managing the radar module and a TCP link, emitting structured detection data
- Ingest: a Python TCP server that normalizes readings into SQLite
- Monitoring: a live web dashboard plus a REST API for downstream analysis
- Hardware: a custom KiCad carrier board and a 3D-printed enclosure
The documentation habit paid off — a stack of setup and integration guides means the whole thing can be picked back up cold.
Status
Paused. The software pipeline works end to end; the custom board was last touched in April 2026. The radar techniques here feed directly into the sensing side of the RF program.