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I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

gauthier-lechevalier.com

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Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#51

Post by c2h5oh »

GL26 wrote: post #42
Animats wrote: post #41

Get this guy into YC. He knows how to do it, but not how to sell it. This needs to join the families of devices that find wooden studs, electrical wiring, and plumbing. This is a general purpose technology. It can be reprogrammed to find other things. It should be in a blister-pack at Home Depot if it can be made cheaply, and in a hard case at Tool Town if it can't.

Hi, thank you so much for your comment, the research was cool to do, but the market isn't there, and this is not something people really want (to retake YC's wording). You can have all the tech you want, but at the end of the day, the important thing is to have something that really brings value to your customer

Property managers handling municipal property in mid+ cities will want one.

Any company dealing with construction waste disposal will want one.

Both will have no problem shelling out 1000 euro per unit.

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#52

Post by Melatonic »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #48
Animats wrote: post #41

Get this guy into YC. He knows how to do it, but not how to sell it. This needs to join the families of devices that find wooden studs, electrical wiring, and plumbing. This is a general purpose technology. It can be reprogrammed to find other things. It should be in a blister-pack at Home Depot if it can be made cheaply, and in a hard case at Tool Town if it can't.

Is there anything that reliably finds wooden studs in walls? I've tried a whole range of different stud finders and all of them are at a level of reliability roughly on par with the Psychic Friends Network: "I think there may be something there... or is it over there? No, perhaps there". In the end the most reliable way of locating studs I found was going outside, measuring the distance between the nails in the exter…

Experience and tapping with your knuckles :-)

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#53

Post by Melatonic »

Domenic_S wrote: post #31
dylan604 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

isn't mmWave the thing they use at the airports?

Yes it is! I've been down the mmWave rabbit hole for the last 6 months, making sensors to put around the house to control automations for lights and so forth. They're pretty great. For my use case the advantage over PIR is they do presence detection, so no more lights shutting off when you're sitting on the toilet. Pretty amazing you can pick up basic mmWave sensors for a few bucks on amazon, and mate them to an esp3…

Believe they do use a good amount more power though (mainly only an issue for battery based devices)

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#54

Post by Melatonic »

amirhirsch wrote: post #40
buildbot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err holy shit that’s quite the array and FPGA processing backend. I assume the purpose of the system is secret? (VCU128s are relatively large, HBM equipped FPGAs for people not aware)

(Linked VCU128 digital radar was cool but even cooler is using them as digital array beamformers and sending RDMA over fiber into a quad A100s nvlinked to do the whole radar DSP pipeline)

What project was that for ?! Sounds super cool

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#55

Post by idiotsecant »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #48
Animats wrote: post #41

Get this guy into YC. He knows how to do it, but not how to sell it. This needs to join the families of devices that find wooden studs, electrical wiring, and plumbing. This is a general purpose technology. It can be reprogrammed to find other things. It should be in a blister-pack at Home Depot if it can be made cheaply, and in a hard case at Tool Town if it can't.

Is there anything that reliably finds wooden studs in walls? I've tried a whole range of different stud finders and all of them are at a level of reliability roughly on par with the Psychic Friends Network: "I think there may be something there... or is it over there? No, perhaps there". In the end the most reliable way of locating studs I found was going outside, measuring the distance between the nails in the exter…

Magnets find studs pretty well in my experience

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#56

Post by quickthrowman »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #48
Animats wrote: post #41

Get this guy into YC. He knows how to do it, but not how to sell it. This needs to join the families of devices that find wooden studs, electrical wiring, and plumbing. This is a general purpose technology. It can be reprogrammed to find other things. It should be in a blister-pack at Home Depot if it can be made cheaply, and in a hard case at Tool Town if it can't.

Is there anything that reliably finds wooden studs in walls? I've tried a whole range of different stud finders and all of them are at a level of reliability roughly on par with the Psychic Friends Network: "I think there may be something there... or is it over there? No, perhaps there". In the end the most reliable way of locating studs I found was going outside, measuring the distance between the nails in the exter…

Receptacle boxes are nailed to studs, once you locate one you can find the others along that wall if you know the stud spacing.

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#57

Post by Aspos »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #48
Animats wrote: post #41

Get this guy into YC. He knows how to do it, but not how to sell it. This needs to join the families of devices that find wooden studs, electrical wiring, and plumbing. This is a general purpose technology. It can be reprogrammed to find other things. It should be in a blister-pack at Home Depot if it can be made cheaply, and in a hard case at Tool Town if it can't.

Is there anything that reliably finds wooden studs in walls? I've tried a whole range of different stud finders and all of them are at a level of reliability roughly on par with the Psychic Friends Network: "I think there may be something there... or is it over there? No, perhaps there". In the end the most reliable way of locating studs I found was going outside, measuring the distance between the nails in the exter…

Cheap thermal camera lets you literally see the studs. Does not work when ambient temperature inside is the same as outside though

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#58

Post by ForgotIdAgain »

Havoc wrote: post #17

Kinda crazy that it worked but got no commercial interest. Hopefully someone suitable here sees it and can intervene Does it also work through other materials. i.e. through a drywall etc.

Looks like he succesfully pivoted: https://waves.black/ and he is building an OTA update framework apparently now : https://www.nanoforgeflow.com/

The guy is scrappy.

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#59

Post by Animats »

eigart wrote: post #46
GL26 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, thank you so much for your comment, the research was cool to do, but the market isn't there, and this is not something people really want (to retake YC's wording). You can have all the tech you want, but at the end of the day, the important thing is to have something that really brings value to your customer

I interpreted the comment as “give this guy some money and he will figure it out”. You have some serious skill, this just wasn’t the right idea.

Needs a team with someone who works on product fit and market evaluation. A handheld device that analyzes hidden materials cheaply has a market. Microwave beam-forming and neural nets in a handheld device at a low cost is new technology. And get a patent, or there will be cheap ones from Shenzhen.

Re: I built a mmWave material classification radar (2025)

#60

Post by pseudohadamard »

Aspos wrote: post #57
pseudohadamard wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything that reliably finds wooden studs in walls? I've tried a whole range of different stud finders and all of them are at a level of reliability roughly on par with the Psychic Friends Network: "I think there may be something there... or is it over there? No, perhaps there". In the end the most reliable way of locating studs I found was going outside, measuring the distance between the nails in the exter…

Cheap thermal camera lets you literally see the studs. Does not work when ambient temperature inside is the same as outside though

Good point, I've used that to find all sorts of things inside the walls. As you say, it works best when there's serious thermal bridging going on.
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