Identifying Serial Ports for TI mmWave Radar Connection

You may need to determine the serial (COM) port on your host computer that is connected to the TI mmWave radar. This step requires you to establish a connection to the TI radar board in the Hardware Setup window, when creating mmWaveRadar or dca1000 objects in MATLAB, or during the modeling workflow in Simulink.

If only one TI Radar board is connected, MATLAB typically attempts to automatically detect the ports associated with the TI mmWave radar. However, if you have multiple TI mmWave radars connected, or if MATLAB is unable to auto-detect the COM port (for example, if you encounter errors related to the COM port or the Hardware Setup window does not display, or displays multiple COM ports), you can manually identify the correct ports using the information below.

TI mmWave radar uses two ports for configuration - Config port and Data port.

You can use Device Manager (or the equivalent application for your operating system) to find the configuration and data ports. In the Device Manager window, expand the Ports (COM & LPT) list.

  • The configuration port is usually named Silicon Labs Dual CP2105 USB to UART Bridge: Enhanced COM Port or XDS110 Class Application/User UART.

  • The data port is usually named Silicon Labs Dual CP2105 USB to UART Bridge: Standard COM Port or XDS110 Class Auxiliary Data Port.

In MATLAB workflows, you can use the Tab completion feature to view the available configuration ports when creating an mmWaveRadar or dca1000 object.

To display the available ports for `ConfigPort` while creating an mmWaveRadar object, type the following command in the MATLAB Command Window (update the board name as needed), and press the Tab key after the equals sign (=): 

tiradar = mmWaveRadar("TI IWR6843ISK", ConfigPort =

Similarly, when creating a dca1000 object, enter: 

dca = dca1000(“IWR6843ISK”, ConfigPort =

Press the Tab key after the equals sign (=) in each case to view the list of available ports.

Note

dca1000 object creation to read raw ADC data requires the Config port only, and not the Data port.

In Simulink modeling workflows, you can use the identified COM port (Config port) by choosing the Manually Specify or Manually Select option in the Configuration Parameters, under Hardware Implementation > Target Hardware Resources > Host board connection.

For example, to manually specify the port, go to the Simulink Configuration Parameters and enter the appropriate COM port in the Host board connection settings.

Note

 In Simulink workflows, you need to specify the Config port to download the model to the hardware and to connect to the hardware for Monitor and Tune, PIL, or Build and Deploy workflows.