RCWL-0516 Microwave Radar Sensor Experiences?

Good to hear it works for you ! But I suspect you haven’t tried the right PIRs then. There’s a surprisingly wide quality gap (more like a huge canyon lol) between garbage like this and industry quality PIR sensors like the ones from Panasonic I linked to earlier. Since I ended up replacing most of my RCWLs with PIRs I have not found a single instance where the RCWLs would have objectively performed better, even during the time they were still functioning properly. In fact, the (quality) PIRs largely outperform the RCWLs in pretty much all situations I installed them in, both indoors and outdoors. And that while using between 170 and 5800 times less power than the RCWLs. The only real advantage of the RCWL is that you can completely hide them, put them behind a wall or in a sealed box, etc.

I’m planning on ordering a couple of 24GHz and 60GHz radar sensors from more reputable industrial part manufacturers and see how that goes and how they compare to both the RCWL and the PIRs.

Edit: nitpicking I know, but the RCWL are not actually doppler radars. They’re not even radars. That’s just marketing. They’re free running oscillators that are detuned by the presence of big bags of water like us. That very simplified principle is their main weakness in terms of reliability and interference with wifi and other RF. Actual radars, like pulsed coherent radars, are not affected by all that.

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