Walabot - See Through Almost Anything

[EEVblog]

Not crowd funded, but the same vibe:

I've never seen a product claim to be capable of so many things!
http://www.walabot.com/

[EEVblog]

Gregory Charvat said in a tweet

It's switched array or TDM Mimo, 10 or 24 ghz.  Blobs thu drywall/plywood no cncrte

and

also, no way it can see at molecular level or your neurons firing.  It sees coarse blobs through light mediums at these wavelengths

and

yes plausible, but hype is set to 11.  All you will see are very large blobs, not crisp imagery alluded to in video.

[mtdoc]

What the?......

Slick marketing and intriguing idea but from the video the prototype looks to have about 20 x 15 pixel resolution 

[bookaboo]

There's nothing in that plywood box demo that hasn't been done before. But if they can actually make it into a useful product then good luck to them, microwave arrays are crying out for more real world applications
Unfortunately looks like the marketing department is running the show.


I've been wanting to do a microwave project since I heard Greg on theamphour
http://www.theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-115-watcher-of-wraithlike-walls/

[EEVblog]

Tech details here:
http://www.walabot.com/img/walabot-press-kit.pdf

[Kalidor]

Tech details here:
http://www.walabot.com/img/walabot-press-kit.pdf

3-10GHz antennas, that's a small radar array in the S,C and traditional X band. It will not see what's inside your microwave oven
You can pre-order a Dev Kit, software will be nowhere. Nice toy, not so nice marketing.

[ChunkyPastaSauce]

So Walabot is actually ?Vayyar Imaging Ltd based in Israel. Founded 2010, 2012 they raised 12million to develop a similar device for breast cancer detection.

http://www.vayyar.com/
 
  Vayyar marketing videos, much of it is the same as Walabot
Better video showing more realistic capabilities (if truthful),

http://makezine.com/2015/09/28/new-sensor-see-walls/ 
https://youtu.be/7aDmwxgEs3k PCB marked as Vayyar vMaker

[nidlaX]

Demo and teardown by bigclive:

[EEVblog]

Demo and teardown by bigclive:

As expected, crude and blocky just like Gregory Charvat predicted ages ago.

[igendel]

I met one on the Wallabot guys, about a year ago; they wanted my feedback on the opportunities of this device for the local Maker community.

The concept looks great and promising; digital cameras weren't born with Gigapixel sensors either. But I believe this will require a tremendous amount of advanced math and hardware tricks, and that requires a very large budget, which in turn requires a lot of premature hype just to get the investors...

[EEVblog]

The concept looks great and promising; digital cameras weren't born with Gigapixel sensors either. But I believe this will require a tremendous amount of advanced math and hardware tricks, and that requires a very large budget, which in turn requires a lot of premature hype just to get the investors...

It already uses a tremendous amount of advanced math and hardware tricks that had a very large budget, at least $34M to date:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vayyar#/entity

So it's already achieved it's goal to get investment, but I can't see how it will achieve much else apart from some niche application somewhere.
It's like uBean, Fontus etc, there is only so much you can do. I don't think you are going to magically get an order or magnitude or two better performance with more money.
i think it will remain at that niche "cute tech" level forever more.

[igendel]

It already uses a tremendous amount of advanced math and hardware tricks that had a very large budget, at least $34M to date:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vayyar#/entity

almost 65% of which is from less than half a year ago. With this recent addition though, they better deliver on their promise 

I don't think you are going to magically get an order or magnitude or two better performance with more money.
i think it will remain at that niche "cute tech" level forever more.

Perhaps. I, at least, am definitely not at a level to make predictions. But looking through walls is not the only implementation of this, and maybe they'll pull some magic off after all.

[tszaboo]

I guess it works exacly the same way like the millimeter wave image scanner they already use at airports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimeter_wave_scanner
Or the millimeter wave radar they use on cruisers, shooting down incoming missiles with machine guns. Fun fact, they track bullets, and they use the trajectory to shoot the missile.
Or the radar my five year old toyota uses for cruise control. It is hidden behind the logo.
So what is exactly the news?

[coppice]

The concept looks great and promising; digital cameras weren't born with Gigapixel sensors either. But I believe this will require a tremendous amount of advanced math and hardware tricks, and that requires a very large budget, which in turn requires a lot of premature hype just to get the investors...

It already uses a tremendous amount of advanced math and hardware tricks that had a very large budget, at least $34M to date:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vayyar#/entity

So it's already achieved it's goal to get investment, but I can't see how it will achieve much else apart from some niche application somewhere.
It's like uBean, Fontus etc, there is only so much you can do. I don't think you are going to magically get an order or magnitude or two better performance with more money.
i think it will remain at that niche "cute tech" level forever more.

With most plumbing moving to plastic pipes, metal detectors are no longer an effective way to trace things in walls. Old walls, with chicken wire embedded in lathe and plaster, aren't readily searchable with metal detectors. This device definitely has value, and there seems no reason to expect they will screw up technically if they have got this far. The question will be whether people are prepared to pay enough, and the market is big enough, to justify their investment.

This is nothing like uBeam. uBeam clearly has a large potential market, but there is no way they can technically satisfy the market they have set for themselves. If they had started out with the goal of powering tiny IoT devices spread around the house, they might have been able to build a market from these milliwatt consuming gadgets that are likely to be placed where there is no other power. They set themselves on a course to total failure by making their goal the delivery multiple watts to larger devices.

[EEVblog]

This device definitely has value, and there seems no reason to expect they will screw up technically if they have got this far.

I was not in any way suggesting they were going to screw this up. It is obvious they have a very competent team and are showing real results and shipping hardware.
It has to do the with the hype that surrounded it's capabilities.

The question will be whether people are prepared to pay enough, and the market is big enough, to justify their investment.

One of their big pitches was that it could be a consumer level add-on for smartphones. And that's the thing, I don't think the consumer would find this novel enough to buy it, as opposed to say the infrared phone attachments add-ons. The market difference would have to be several orders different.

This is nothing like uBeam. uBeam clearly has a large potential market, but there is no way they can technically satisfy the market they have set for themselves.

It is very similar to uBeam in the promises and hype that was generated.
But in the end there is only so much you can do with the tech and the laws of engineering and physics.

The application hype was warp factor 9:

[coppice]

This device definitely has value, and there seems no reason to expect they will screw up technically if they have got this far.

I was not in any way suggesting they were going to screw this up. It is obvious they have a very competent team and are showing real results and shipping hardware.
It has to do the with the hype that surrounded it's capabilities.

The question will be whether people are prepared to pay enough, and the market is big enough, to justify their investment.

One of their big pitches was that it could be a consumer level add-on for smartphones. And that's the thing, I don't think the consumer would find this novel enough to buy it, as opposed to say the infrared phone attachments add-ons. The market difference would have to be several orders different.

It would have to be super cheap to be an attractive mass market add on for phones, but I can seen it being attractive to tradesmen at a reasonably high price. There are quite a lot of those in the world.

This is nothing like uBeam. uBeam clearly has a large potential market, but there is no way they can technically satisfy the market they have set for themselves.

It is very similar to uBeam in the promises and hype that was generated.
But in the end there is only so much you can do with the tech and the laws of engineering and physics.

The application hype was warp factor 9:

I hadn't seen that picture before. It certainly paints a more hypey picture than their recent "look inside a wall" demos, but they are starting with an application where they are likely to achieve results that please their customers. Everyone likes to paint a picture that they will eventually change the world.

[jurge24pez]

It's like uBean, Fontus etc, there is only so much you can do. I don't think you are going to magically get an order or magnitude or two better performance with more money.
i think it will remain at that niche "cute tech" level forever more.
[/quote]

Nothing like uBeam aka u-Ream.  How can you first even say ubeam has a large market opportunity when who will buy a huge wall mount system that costs a fortune and doesn't charge past the end of your nose.  At least walabot has technical feasibility and a team with merits who have successfully implemented before.

[mikeselectricstuff]

They sent me one a while ago, but I've not had much time to play with it so far. My initial feeling is it could be more interesting of the antennas were further apart, to get more spatial resolution.

I had a long chat with them at Maker Faire. Apparently the tech was initially developed for medical imaging, an example being the use of a 3D array to detect breast cancer without the need for x-rays. Apparently they are getting very good results from a trial in Isreal at the moment.
 Seems to me that the concept of measuring between various pairs of antennas makes more sense in a 3D setup than the 2D in the Walabot unit.
An issue is that it takes a long time to get approval for medical stuff, so they're looking for other applications in the meantime.
I doubt it will be cheap enough for routine domestic uses like finding pipes in walls, but may find some niche applications.

They also sent one to Bigclive :