The goal of this project was to create development board to test the capabilities of the RP2040 microcontroller in RF applications. The RP2040 has many capabilities that make it a good candidate for a low cost intermediate frequency (IF) data acquisition board.

The firmware takes full advantage of the programmable I/O (PIO) and direct memory address (DMA) features to offload the ADC related tasks from the dual core processor into a deterministic state machine. The cores are then fully available to run any user defined signal processing on the data to ensure maximum data processing speed.

Next Steps

This project will allow for investigations into radar and metasurface technologies at Mho Sciences. A breadboard version of an attachable radar to this DAQ is under development, with plans for a PCB based version in 2025.

The RP2350 has recently been released and as it becomes available, a second iteration of this board will be designed to take advantage of the DSP and increase in processing speed.