thank you, that makes sense. have you used nix/nixOS before? I am currently using it and considering to switch (maybe to gentoo ^^)

How does Gentoo deal with this? Just curious, I’m looking to try it this weekend

It definitely depends on the circumstances. With 60 GHz radar e.g. you get quite a good distance resolution and can detect e.g. breathing rate really well (from the torso movement during breathing) and things like how many people are in a room, etc. But its always very dependent on the environment, your settings, subjects, noise, whatever. That’s why I said its typically not practical. By using dedicated devices perhaps, and most of these kinds of news are about people who use dedicated devices, but that’s like putting a camera in your home. When you have to abuse an existing communication channel, probably not so realistic.

My topic was fall detection (as in elderly people falling) specifically without using cameras or wearables. The idea was to take the CSI (basically what you see in the image) and just stuff it into some machine learning model to get a prediction as to whether someone fell in a given time frame, so I was trying to classify the signature of the falling “activity”. From my literature survey, this has been done successfully with CSI. But as with a lot of research, it typically lacked practicality. Much of my work was implementing the firmware, data recording, processing, and so on. I also had to record a ton of falls (ouch) and label them. I ended up throwing away the CSI approach though, because of the noise reasons I mentioned. That was simply a deal breaker. I went with FMCW radar instead (and it worked pretty good).

Interesting. I didn’t actually read into BFI details, thank you

to be fair, maybe. To pass FCC/CE regulation regarding EMC, it has to adhere to strict limits at 2.4 GHz (but I could also imagine for microwave ovens specifically that the allowed emissions are higher than for other devices, because 2.4 GHz is just the band it operates in. But idk, I didnt read the standard for those). But it does not mean that it may not radiate anything in that band.

Anyways, my observation was that it did interfere and the microwave was definitely closed. But also it was not 10m distance to the microwave, more like 2m, so relatively close. WiFi receivers are quite sensitive to be able to work with low received powers. So just a little emission is sufficient to interfere. You are probably not disturbing the communication itself, because OFDM is quite robust, but it certainly destroyed my use case (which operated on the whole CSI).

And there is definitely some stuff leaking, e.g. through radiated emissions on the wiring (the power line). But it is certainly not cooking anything. That’s also what the regulation makes sure of.

I think the main advantage with the wifi-based approaches is that they are usually used in a relatively static/calm indoor environment with a stable channel response and your motions are disturbing that, compared to a quickly changing outdoor environment (e.g. a city) where it would be much harder to distinguish individuals. Also, you are typically closer to the access points, making the power/SNR higher. Regarding mobile communication though, the trend is towards higher frequencies and smaller cell sizes which also give greater spatial resolution (and higher power) and some funky near-field effects can be used to get beam forming on crack: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10147 So perhaps it could work even better, wouldn’t be surprised

I mentioned this in a another reply, but you just need a microwave oven basically :)

That’s using CSI though. The article said the researches specifically did not utilize CSI.

But regarding CSI: I evaluated that as a small part of my Master’s thesis and it worked pretty OK for motion detection but not for classifying other activities, at least not on a SISO link. For more complex stuff you would need both a MIMO access point (router) and device (e.g. phone). Also, you need to constantly transmit messages to get up-to-date CSI, which is not great for power consumption as well as cluttering the communication channel. There are some other constraints, especially regarding noise. E.g. I managed to completely destroy the CSI spectrogram by turning on a microwave oven. There is 802.11bf in development, which is supposed to standardize this, because currently using CSI is pretty much a “hack”, as it is not intended for sensing. Once this is widely adopted, I would start being worried, but not right now.

This is from my thesis:

Thanks :) Yeah, I didn’t show the ugly parts perhaps, haha. Especially the libadwaita apps (like Nautilus). I used to rice a lot more but don’t have so much time/patience for it now, and I think the current solution will stay for a while. Previously, I would have everything in one color scheme, i.e. bars, terminal, apps, editor, … but it is a bunch of work to maintain. So previously it would look something like this:

Plus, your source files would also have to actually be in that format. As an example, Spotify apparently supports up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC only

The observation is that most USB-C to 3.5mm (“aux jack”) audio dongles are supporting high quality audio but only support the USB Full Speed (FS) data rate which is not enough for the high quality audio. This causes problems.

It’s awesome! I used FreeCAD and OpenSCAD before and I think I will stick to solvespace for new projects. FreeCAD is OK but quite buggy and the parametric design is a pain. OpenSCAD is also great and I still use it for some things. I think parametric design is cool, but 99/100 times it is completely unnecessary for me and solvespace made me realize this. I initially disliked being unable to define variables for dimensions (and re-using them) but again it’s often overkill and disrupts the flow quite a bit, so suddenly you would spend hours defining parameters and calculations that you wouldn’t use anyways. TLDR: YAGNI basically. Also, solvespace is pretty :) What about you?

Even radar would not cause cancer. At least not that I know of

damn… its sitting at 301 Kelvin currently…

I’m still rocking an i7 4790k and its >10 years old! Judging from the other comments it seems the intel issue is more of a recent one though. If I ever configure a new PC, I’ll check out AMD for sure.

Currently doing embedded and I wish Yocto would be based on Nix and not its own language. But I’m starting to get used to it

I knew RMS is supposed to refer to Richard Stallman and while reading my head filled it in as “Richard Maria Stallman”

Using NixOS at home and I swear I’m not a furry! At work, I use CachyOS (Arch). My wife is sad that there was no mention of Solus…