What could possibly be better than printing out a few low-resolution voxels on a MakerBot? A whole lot of things, but how about getting those voxels with your own synthetic aperture radar? That’s what [Gregory Charvat] has been up to, and he’s documented the entire process for us.
The build began with an ultra wideband impulse radar we saw a while ago. The radar is built from scraps [Greg] picked up on eBay, and is able to image a scene in the time domain, creating nice linear sweeps on a MATLAB plot when [Greg] runs in front of the horns.
With an impulse radar under his belt, [Greg] moved up the technological ladder to something that can produce vaguely intelligible images with his setup. The synthetic aperture radar made from putting his radar horns on the carriage of a garage door opener. The horns slowly scan back and forth along the linear rail, taking single impulse readings and adding them together in an image. In the video below, [Greg] is able to image a few pieces of copper pipe only a few inches in diameter. The necessary equipment for this build only cost [Greg] a few hundred bucks at the Dayton Hamvention, and a similar setup could be put together for even less.
If building an X band impulse synthetic aperture radar isn’t impressive enough. [Greg] also 3D printed one of his radar images on a MakerBot. That’s just applying stlwrite to the 2D radar image and feeding it into MakerWare. Gotta have that blog cred, doe. It also makes for the best headline I’ve ever written.
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