I built a mmWave material classification radar

2025 · [radar, rf, dsp, embedded, beamforming, startup] Software is now a commodity thanks to Claude Code. So the next step is obviously hardware. I spent the last 6 months on building a hardware startup, which was fucking hard. I made a radar that could classify materials, and this is the story of how I did it as my "end of studies" project. By the way, the project never ended (as you will see down this article, because of a lack of funding) I live in Europe, where asbestos is a huge and common pain across every country here. That stuff fills walls, and requires people to come at your place to tell you if you have asbestos contaminated materials in your building. If so, you might have been breathing poison since you were a kid. Asbestos gives you cancer, and can fuck you up pretty bad. The traditional ways of detecting it, is basically to pick a wall sample, send it to a lab, and they tell you if you have asbestos in your walls. Of course, there a lot of intermediaries that come into place to catch a good amount of money based on regulations and your fear of getting poisoned. So a 1$ analysis becomes a 60$ one to the end payer, and when you have to make tens of them, price skyrockets. So my project was to build a radar that detects asbestos for you. It's based of material sciences, and wave physics, which happens to be my areas of expertise (recent eng grad). There I had my device plan : make an asbestos sensing radar. Then, I had to design electronics, so because I am not a bozo, and I hope you are not one either, I ordered dev boards to quickly prototype. In my case : a Texas instrument IWRL6432 BOOST, and an ESP32 dev kit. Assembled them, and started tinkering with DSP algorithms to detect materials. Built this test bench to test out the electromagnetic response of materials to my special material radar. I could hot swap materials and tighten materials to test out my device. I finalised my approach with capon beamforming to get a density spectre, which I fed out to a neural network. And this allowed me to classify material surfaces, which under the "same surface, same layer" material hypothesis and "material change is sudden and discontinuous", would then allow me to say "hey this entire layer is made out of x,y,z material." The radar is FMCW : it doesn't emit a single tone, it sweeps its frequency upward over time (chirp). The whole job of the DSP chain is to turn the echoes of those chirps into a material signature. Here is how it works : The output of all this is a per-range, per-angle density "spectre" the electromagnetic fingerprint of whatever surface sits in front of the radar. That spectre is exactly the tensor I fed to the neural network to classify the material. scanning a surface with the radar — the density spectre, before the AI step I spent two months on this, getting the toolchain right, and on the infamous compile flash debug loop of embedded firmware. Since everyone is using AI right now, might as well put some AI in your invention to put new capabilities that you could never before. So what we did is put neural network that ingests the output of the DSP chain, and outputs a class of material. This model actually "learns" the electromagnetic properties of materials (epsilon' and epsilon''), it's just a classic CNN. Then, came the mechanical casings, started making a look-a-like, when I finally came to the conclusion that designing around the devboards was a way better approach. I also went into the rabbit hole of RF prototyping. Ask anyone, they will tell you that RF is straight up black magic. PDEs, Physics, and Chaotic systems, all packed in a single field. So I started modeling my antennas to capture what was happening in my circuit to reverse engineer it. Here is how I optimized the antenna shapes so that they would have the same characteristics as the ones in the Texas Instrument's one. Had a parametric simulation I coded inside OpenEMS, which calculated the antenna's characteristics, and then, by extrapolating the transfer functions from TX to RX (Mimo array), I could use convolution operations to simulate how my chirps were emitted, reflected on the surface, and received by the antennas. full chirp emission / reflection / reception simulation I managed to get simulated signatures that were close enough to real measured outputs. And then, it was just a question of getting my hands on materials that contained asbestos. Firstly, I used openEMS, an open source alternative to Ansys HFSS (which costs basically a whole kidney to get a license). It uses FDTD simulation to model how the Maxwell equations propagate in materials. More info about FDTD here : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-difference_time-domain_method (I used the Yee method). However, the problem of openEMS is that it doesn't run on GPUs, so you better reduce the size of your simulation (both in the time and space domain) to get results fast, and iterate on it (notably if you are doing a parametric optim

I built a mmWave material classification radar

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