Silicon Radar SiRad Simple User Manual Download Page 10

Page: 10 / 33

User Guide (Version 2.2) of the
SiRad Simple® Evaluation Kit

- 10 -

2.2.2 Connecting to the Board via USB

If  you  want  to  connect  to  the  sensor  via  WiFi  instead  of  USB,  please  directly  continue  with
Section  2.2.3.  The  sensor  board  can  be  connected  to  a  PC  via  USB  through  an  FTDI  cable
(delivered with the evaluation kit), which provides a virtual COM port. We recommend using a cable
with FTDI chipset instead of cheaper alternatives since a lot of our customers found the cheaper
alternatives to be very unstable. If you want to use a cheaper alternative, skip the next point and
see the vendor’s website of your cable.

Installing the FTDI driver
Microsoft Windows usually installs the driver automatically once the FTDI cable is connected to the
PC.  Therefore,  the  PC  has  to  be  connected  to  the  internet  and  the  automatic  driver  installation
feature has  to be  enabled  (default  behavior).  If you  need  to  install  the  driver  manually,  go to the
FTDI  Chip  website

and download the latest VCP driver. Please read the Installation Guide and

Release Note linked on the vendor’s website. Once the FTDI driver is installed, the FTDI cable
connected to the sensor and to the PC should provide a virtual COM port. On Microsoft Windows,
the COM port number can be checked in the device manager by connecting and disconnecting the
USB port of the FTDI cable. Before you proceed with the installation of the software, you can now
optionally connect to this serial port using a terminal program such as PuTTY

or Realterm

with the

following UART settings: 230400 baud, 8 bits, 1 stop bit, no flow control. You should see plenty of
protocol output from the sensor like in Figure 7 (left).

Figure 7: Terminal output of the sensor (left) and COM2WebSocket tool (right)

Installing the Evaluation Kit’s COM2WebSocket tool
The Evaluation Kit software contains a COM2WebSocket tool that creates a WebSocket from the
virtual  COM  port  to  provide  it  to  the  graphical  user  interface.  You  can  find  the  tool  in  the  Install
Package in the ‘Software’ folder. The COM2WebSocket tool is portable and can be copied to a path
of  your  choice  on  your  PC.  Make  sure  that  the  java.exe  of  your  Java  JRE  or  SDK  installation  is
available in the PATH variable of Windows, then start it by double clicking the Com2Websocket.jar
file. Alternatively, or if you do not have Admin rights, you can also change the path to the ‘java.exe’
file of your Java installation in the file ‘runme.bat’ of the COM2WebSocket tool and then run it by a
double click on the ‘runme.bat’ file. In the COM2WebSocket application window, select the virtual
COM port number that belongs to your sensor board and select 230400 baud as the baudrate like
shown in Figure 7. A click on the ‘connect’ button opens a WebSocket server, which is fed with the
data  coming  from  the  sensor  board.  Proceed  to  Section  2.2.4  for  running  the  graphical  user
interface.