What Is the Barra Radar BLE?

In 2023, the US government updated legislation which allows the unlicensed civilian use of 60GHz radars, opening the door for these kinds of radars to enter mass-production globally. This technology is a highly accurate and highly affordable distance and object detection method and unlike ultrasonic sensors, is far less affected by environmental conditions like dust and humidity. The Barra Radar was designed to give a long-life, high accuracy and medium distance (several meters) detection capability to any Digital Matter Bluetooth® hardware by combining a 60GHz radar with a battery-powered BLE beacon in a Barra form-factor. You can pair a Barra Radar BLE with a Digital Matter Bluetooth® gateway device (i.e. G70 Bluetooth®, Oyster Edge, etc.) to enable the following:

• Industrial/agricultural fluid level detection with sub-centimetre accuracy.
• Trailer loaded/unloaded states for containers or goods.
• Door open-closed states for containers and gates.
• Waste receptacle fill levels to alert service teams to a full bin.

Physical Installation of the Barra Radar BLE

The Barra Radar BLE requires 2 AA Batteries in order to function - we have received positive feedback from partners employing Energizer™ Lithium Ultimate for similar applications. While the Barra Radar BLE comes with a magnet under tape in the housing it is currently without function and will not impact the behaviour of the device (updates are planned).

The Barra Radar BLE App

Available on iOS and Android (links coming soon!), we have developed an app to accompany the Barra Radar BLE which will facilitate the following:

1. Modification of Bluetooth Low Energy beaconing behaviour (i.e. chirp rate)
2. Modification of basic radar setup - setting object detection thresholds and scan durations
3. Modification of advanced radar setup.

You can use the app to apply settings to your Barra Radars and view their sensor readings in real-time.
 

Analog Mapping with the Barra Radar BLE

There are several options for connecting to the Barra Radar BLE to one of our existing Bluetooth® gateway devices, including generating a scoped Barra Radar BLE tag list, filtering for individual tags, or Bluetooth® Tag Analog Mapping. Should you choose to marry a specific Barra Radar BLE to your gateway via analog mapping, the following strings can be pasted into the system parameter boxes.  

Custom tag type:

255,16,0,4F067900,20,11

Analog mappings: 

0,0,2,1,,0,2,3,1,,0,4,2,1,,0,6,3,1,,0,8,0,0,,0,9,2,1,

This will result in data being written to the following six analogs sequentially, so ensure that you have enough room!

The information contained, in order is:

1. Distance 1 (the strongest distance)
2. Strength 1 (how strong was the signal?)
3. Distance 2 (the second strongest distance)
4. Strength 2 (how strong was the signal?)
5. Object detection flag (1 means something was found within the configured range)
6. Battery voltage (2x AA batteries)

How Can I Get Started?

To become a beta tester for the Barra Radar and gain early access to the app, please contact Digital Matter Support and state your willingness to join our beta program for this device.