GoKawiilHow I built a mmWave material classification radar
2025 · [radar, rf, dsp, embedded, beamforming, startup]
the prototype — IWRL6432 + ESP32 inside the casing
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.
The idea
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.
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