A New Sensor to See Through Walls

The Walabot is a new 3D imaging sensor that can detect movement and speed, see through walls, and analyze materials to tell you their composition.

While the peace dividend of the smart phone wars has benefited everyone, with cheap access to accelerometers, gyroscopes, and NFC sensors amongst other things. As Makers it’s actually fairly rare that we acquire new levers on the world, so the arrival of the Walabot development board is intriguing. Access to a new type of sensor, means new ways to make things.

We talked with Ofer Familier, a member of the Walabot team, about their new chip and the development board built around it.  The company is intending to take both products to market at the beginning of next year.

Based around a radar system with multiple antennas, and wideband frequency operation, the development board comes with 14 built-in Tx/Rx linear polarized wideband antennas operating from 3-10GHz. Using these multiple wavelength allows the sensor to not only make standard Doppler measurements for speed and movement, but also do RF imaging, and use relative permittivity measurements, carry out analysis of liquids.

In other words, the sensor can not only detect movement, and see through walls, but it can tell you how much alcohol is in your bottle of beer, or how much fat is in your carton of milk.

If you’re interested in picking up a Walabot development board, for the next couple of days, you can use the coupon code MAKERWALABOT to get a $20 discount off the preorder price of $249.