HB100 Doppler radar motion sensor

[LukeW]

These interesting sensors are quite cheap, about USD$5 for an interesting little device, so I thought I'd take one apart and post a pic of what's inside.

The backside of the board shows the transmit and receive antennas - a pair of patch antennas at either side of the board.

Upon removing the can, you might be surprised that (except for microstrip structures) there are only 5 components - two ICs (presumably one is an oscillator and one is a mixer), a barium titanate DRO (dielectric resonant oscillator) and one resistor and a capacitor, and three pads for 5VDC, ground and the IF output.

The nominal frequency is 10.525 GHz, and a little grubscrew built into the shield can above the DRO "puck" allows for tuning.

Some people in the X-band amateur radio community have modified these with an SMA connector, for use as a general purpose 10 GHz local oscillator: http://www.shfmicro.com/gunn.htm

[miguelvp]

That's awesome, I was impressed by Google Soli from ATAP:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-atap-project-soli-jacquard,29371.html

And NVidia has been also working on it as well:
https://research.nvidia.com/publication/short-range-fmcw-monopulse-radar-hand-gesture-sensing
https://research.nvidia.com/publication/multi-sensor-system-driver%E2%80%99s-hand-gesture-recognition

Do you have a source where to get this for $5?

Edit: never mind, google found me plenty of sources

[Fraser]

Thanks for this heads-up. I just bought a few at £2.75 each.

Great for 10GHz experimentation 

Aurora

[chicken]

Here's a great article that covers some of the RF magic in this module.
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/teardown-tuesday-hb100-doppler-radar-module/

[amyk]

bigclivedotcom looked at two motion sensing LED lamps that use something similar: