IWR6843 Operator Guide¶

This guide covers the supported OpenFlight setup for the TI IWR6843LEVM. It starts with an OpenFlight-ready Raspberry Pi and an unconfigured radar, then walks through wiring, firmware flashing, mounting, measurement, startup, verification, calibration, and offline replay.

The production system uses two radars:

The sound detector sends the same impact edge to both systems. The OPS243 freezes its rolling buffer directly. The Raspberry Pi receives that edge on BCM17 and immediately asks the IWR6843 firmware to finish and dump its rolling frame ring.

For firmware development, architecture, and build instructions, see firmware developer guide. For a plain-language explanation and the July 2026 TrackMan baseline, see the IWR6843 launch-angle field report.

Current Configuration¶

Flash one configurable firmware image, then select a runtime profile:

Choose A Profile¶

Start with wide/default. Its wider range window is more tolerant of tee placement, ball speed, and setup geometry, while IQ16 retains full signal fidelity. Its live inclinometer-adjusted LCMF output measured 0.86 degree MAE across all 59 matched 9-iron and 7-iron shots in an August 9 TrackMan session, with 0.70 degree P50 and 1.75 degree P90 absolute error. Select dense/advanced when temporal density around impact is the priority. It now preserves the same 53-bin range span while using fixed-scale IQ8 and EDMA packing to fit 36 frames in L3. The 2 ms IQ8 transport has passed hardware cadence testing with a 0.0089% HWA miss rate and no EDMA errors, but the 53-bin dense profile still needs source-of-truth TrackMan MAE validation; its horizontal and club metrics remain experimental.

The dense/wide-late experimental profile is identical to dense/advanced except that its final six ball frames remain in bins 47-99 instead of shifting outward to bins 64-116. Use it to test whether the outward late-flight shift, rather than IQ8 storage, causes reduced accuracy on slower shots. It has not been validated against TrackMan.

Changing profiles does not require reflashing. It changes only the config passed to --iwr6843-config. All profiles use the same host-side mount-tilt path, including live inclinometer correction when --inclinometer is enabled. They also use the measured positive TDM sign for normal TX order. Automatic sign selection is reserved for offline diagnostics because multipath can select the mirrored sign and collapse the vertical two8 channel.

On the Pi, verify the checked-in image with:

sha256sum firmware/releases/l3_dump_configurable_capture_20260818.bin

Before You Start¶

You need:

• A Raspberry Pi running OpenFlight.
• A TI IWR6843LEVM and a data-capable USB cable.
• An OPS243 radar connected through either the Pi GPIO UART or a separately powered USB hub.
• A configured SparkFun SEN-14262 sound detector or the equivalent supported trigger. Complete the sound-trigger wiring guide first.
• A stable Pi power supply and stable power for every USB-connected radar.
• Access to the IWR6843 boot-mode switch and RESET button.
• Measurements for radar-to-ball distance, radar-to-net distance, radar height, ball height, and radar tilt.

Run all commands from the OpenFlight repository root unless a section says otherwise.

The setup path¶

Work these in order — each depends on the one before it.

Related¶

• Low-confidence vertical recovery — the OPS-guided fallback policy and its validation.
• Firmware developer guide — build the image from source.