The HLK-LD015 is a 5GHz radar-based device to detect the presence of human beings, and similar moving objects, produced by Hi-Link. The documentation is a little sparse, especially with regards to the UART configuration procedure/commands (not even the baud rate is given!), but the device is ridiculously inexpensive. I paid £1.40 + tax and shipping from an AliExpress seller and the Hi-Link website price is just $1.65. After some sleuthing, I discovered that the “dist_radar_setting_tool” under Downloads on the LD010 prduct page will work with the LD015, although it isn’t clear whether this covers all the options. To use this, you will need something like a USB-Serial converter (I used by old FT232 breakout). Note that the board requires the use of 5V supply and logic. Remember to connect the sensor TX to the converter RX, and vice versa.
I suspect these are made for automatic light control as there is a photodiode and the output is a single I/O pin, and there is no UART output, unlike some of the higher end sensors.
The photodiode is supposed to suppress sensing if there is over threshold light, but the documention is not clear about whether this is enabled, and mentions enablement in software while not explaining that (I am still uninformed on this topic).
The setting tool is branded as “Airtouch” and the chip on the LD015 bears the Airtouch logo and the part number “5810S 2038DA”. Referring to the Airtouch website, this seems likely to be the AT5810 chip. Unfortunately, there is no useful data there.
Observations Using the “Radar Setting Tool”
The setting tool is a fairly thin wrapper around sending UART style serial messages to the sensor. See below for my decoding of the serial message structure.
The baud rate is 9600.
The pertinent settings for practical device use are:
- “Distance”, although this seems not to be a distance measure at all; “threshold” might be better. A value of 0 gives the most sensitive performance, with switching occurring up to around 6m distance. Increasing the value quickly decreases sensitivity and by 6, you have to be right close! Oddly, values of 255 seem fairly sensitive, while the drop-down list has values 0-15. There is no documentation on what the values mean, or the valid range, but a “write” followed by a “read” returns the same value.
- “LightOnTime” controls the duration (seconds) the OUT pin remains high after detection.
- “Lux THR” appears to have no effect and a write followed by a read DOES NOT return the written value (a 0 is always returned).
- It is also possible to enable/disable the radar, and to manually turn the OUT pin on and off. These might be useful for a practical micro-controller + sensor set-up.
Settings appear not to be saved across power-down.
Testing sensitivity was not quite as easy as initially expected, with the triggering distances often seeming to change for the same distance setting. I suspect this is due to the algorithm used to avoid false detection, and it SEEMed to be the case that the sensitivity was a little better just after a bit of fairly close approach (within 2m), lasting a little while and then tailing off. The device will trigger both walking towards and away from the sensor, but it is strictly a movement sensor.
Sniffing the Serial Messages
I used a Picoscope with UART decoding to capture and decode the signals sent by the setting tool and returned by the device.
In the following, the messages are all shown as hexadecimal.
The messages are framed as: {2 bytes of preamble} + {1 byte giving length} + {message} + {1 byte checksum}.
The preamble for messages to the sensor is 555A, while that from the sensor is 55A5.
The length is of the message + the checksum.
The checksum is computed by summing all the bytes [preceeding it] and using the least significant byte (i.e. sum taken modulo 256).
The message is composed of 1 command byte and from 0 to two data bytes. Double-byte data is sent least-significant byte first.
The “light on” (OUT pin high) and off command is 0A, and a single byte of 00 or 01 turns the output off or on, respectively. e.g. 55 5A 03 0A 01 BD turns the output on.
The radar on/off command is D1, and the pattern is the same. e.g. 55 5A 03 D1 00 83 turns the radar off.
The command bytes for “distance”, “light on time”, and “lux thr” vary according to whether a read or write is being undertaken. Distance has one data byte, while the others have two bytes of data.
- Read distance command is 03 and write distance command is 02
- Read light on time command is 05 and write is 04
- Read and write lux thr commands are 07 and 06, respectively
Example: read light on time requires a send of 55 5A 02 05 B6 (note length = 2 this time) and leads to a reply of 55 A5 04 05 2C 01 30 (note length = 4 bytes and that the data is 012C hex = 300 decimal).
General Conclusions
This would make for quite a usable sensor for use with a 5V system such as the “traditional” Arduinos. The range is rather limited and the simple on/off output rather limiting, but for a smaller room or located close to a doorway, this would work well.