QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

Scene_Cast2

I wonder if this tool can help with EMC compliance testing. My TinySA needs an LNA, so I wonder if this has the required noise floor.

ck2

if it can spot/track drones that is a marketing opportunity for airports around the world that have to deal with drone nonsense which shut down flights for days

fiatpandas

The visualizer app reminds me of the same UI / output you get from acoustic cameras.

tamimio

It should be more specific, it spots RC drones operated on ~5.8ghz, it won’t spot RC on 900mhz, nor cellular enabled ones.

kristianpaul

And yet since rtl-sdr times we have passive radars as an option as well https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/passive-radar/

aeturnum

Neat! SDRs have been available at reasonable price points for some time but the processing power to engage with wifi and other digital signals has been somewhat elusive. Assuming RAM can be purchased in the future, I think we might see a lot more prosumer-targeted devices for doing raw signal analysis in the future.

AndrewKemendo

> If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. Since ~2022 and accelerated by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, governments are now behind both private and open source for frontier technology. The companies that captured government contracts in the last century can’t move fast enough to bring tech into the government and national technology policy and funding is collapsing compared to the private sector That’s new in history

mmaunder

Historically these have been quickly shut down without much of an explanation.

nekusar

The original quote for a single tile was $50-$100 They came out at $500 Being off by a bit is fine. Being off by 5x to 10x is.. Yikes.

ericye16

Sigh, fine. I will buy another radio gadget on crowdsupply.

mlfreeman

The visualizer reminds me of my thermal camera. I have heard claims of devices (mostly TVs) supposedly coming with secret 5G cell uplinks built in [never heard a specific model mentioned though]. If there were more variants covering more commonly-used RF bands, people could walk around and literally check for once. (incidentally i'm sure three letter agencies have had this sort of tech in their bug-detecting toolkit for a LONG time)

peteforde

I was almost through the checkout flow last week before I realized that this configuration only supports a relatively narrow frequency range. I work primarily in sub-GHz radio. Please wake me up when they launch their LoRa version, that would be an instant purchase for me.

piinbinary

One day I want to build something like this, except for sound. It would be great to get a heading and distance for where a sound is coming from. This could be both for small scale things (e.g. which part of this is squeaking?) or large scale (e.g. is that booming noise coming from the construction a few blocks away?)

slicktux

I recall reading the original research paper from a student who made the same RF ‘camera’ here in hacker news.

mschuster91

> It sounds like they had to reverse-engineer the MIPI protocol used on the Pi 5 to do this (since it goes through the RP1 chip), and the way it's architected, you can daisy-chain multiple QuadRF modules together, letting each module calculate it's own phase shift. How are they planning on distributing a shared, highly precise clock for that purpose? That's already a PITA if you do QO-100 modes that need high precision, but usually there it's enough to have one good clock that you feed to the LNA... but here? Every single one of these modules needs a very precisely identical timing signal and the kind of chips you can use to multiplex a reference clock signal are pretty expensive.

RobotToaster

Build this into smart glasses and it would be fascinating.

fierycatnet

I just kinda skimmed through it, so it detects drones in sky? Am I understanding this correctly? That might have some defense application considering what's going on in Eastern Europe right now.

bigtech

This has me thinking that fiber optic drones using this technology might be able to discover the location of signal-jamming equipment. But only for the good guys.

superkuh

With the end of easily available rtl-sdr dongles it's a relief to see someone has wrung such exceptional RF instantaneous bandwidth out of an RPI alternative interface. I really hope use of the camera interface for RF takes off.

mrtnmcc

QuadRF creator here. Happy to answer questions! We have a quick demo video as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QvniJk3uNyA Along with a deeper dive video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdJ9Tbm8ALg We didn't give Jeff great direction on camera alignment calibration or setting the radio gain but he seemed to mostly figure it out. We're improving the UI based on his suggestions (it's open source so you can customize it too) The RF augmented reality is just one of many applications of this brand new 4x4 MIMO software-defined radio built from the ground up. The AR uses a web app to stream RF points that your phone/laptop browser then live-merges with your local camera in the browser. I've been obsessed with low latency and high frame rate to make it a truly AR experience. More technical details at https://QuadRF.com/