BaroAware Fusion

Intrusion detection from air pressure plus 60 GHz radar presence — fused on one core. The breach for the volume, the person for the room. No microphone, no camera, no cloud.

← BaroAware Core — the pressure-only module


Pressure tells you the envelope was breached. It cannot tell you whether anyone came in. So this module carries a second physics.

The pressure channel is BaroAware — the enclosed air of a building behaving as one volume, read by a barometric sensor, discriminated from wind — and from an impact that does not open anything — by a neural network trained on field data; those are logged as wind or impulse, not alarmed. It sees a door unlocked quietly with a key, anywhere in the volume, from one point.

The radar channel is a 60 GHz pulsed-coherent radar watching the room itself: motion and presence, with the distance at which it happened — validated to 8.5 metres of direct line of sight in real rooms, through furniture and behind a plastic cover. Through a dry interior wooden door it still detects a person at about 5 metres — damp wood absorbs at 60 GHz, so that figure moves with humidity.

Together they close the loop a classic installation needs two product families for: the pressure channel does the job of the door and window contacts — from one point, for the whole connected volume — and the radar channel does the job of the PIR, better. And because the two rest on unrelated physics, their false-alarm mechanisms do not correlate: the weather does not conspire with radio reflections.

Put simply, the module answers one question, in two halves: is my volume intact — and if it is not, is anyone in there?


What the fusion actually reports

SECURE The envelope is quiet and the room shows no motion.
OPEN A pressure event: the envelope was breached, somewhere in the volume.
PERSON INSIDE The radar sees motion — and says at what distance.

The combinations are where it gets interesting. A pressure event followed by motion is a confirmed intrusion. A pressure event with no motion after it is a door that opened and nobody came in — worth an inspection, not a siren. Motion with no prior pressure event, at closing time, is someone still in the building. And a delivery van tells its fleet system a complete story without a single camera frame: opened at 14:32 · person inside for 47 seconds · closed at 14:34.


Everything runs on the module

Both channels execute concurrently on the Cortex-M4F inside the XM125 radar module itself: pressure sampling, spectral transform, the neural network, the radar processing and both decisions. No cloud, no gateway, no subscription. Measured on the hardware, not estimated: the network verdict costs 76–78 ms of CPU, sliced so finely that the radar keeps its full measurement rate with zero pressure samples lost.

At boot the module proves its own network against a golden reference to the last decimal — a corrupted or mis-flashed model announces itself instead of silently going blind. And failure is loud by design: a lost sensor is reported within a second, and recovered automatically when it returns. Silence is never “all clear”.

=== XM125_BaroAware FUSION (radar presence + BaroAware CNN) === [BMP] addr=0x47 chip=0x50 -> OK 40Hz OSR32x [CNN] golden network (prob x1e6): pos=1000000(exp 1000000) neg=42479(exp 42479) -> PASS [CNN] golden occupancy (x1e6): occFP=494318(exp 494318) -> PASS [MEM] RSS create=2336 B, buffer=2876 B, heap used=6092 B, free=10324 B [RADAR] 60-810 cm, 12 fps, 27 points | [SAMP] 40 Hz timer started RADAR ARMED (warmup done) — QUIET RADAR MOTION at 0.6 m (intra=505 inter=480) BARO EVENT (lg=2771 occ=917 f=938mHz) BARO SENSOR LOST CANNOT MONITOR: BARO [BMP] RECOVERED: addr=0x47 chip=0x50, reconfigured 40Hz OSR32x BARO SENSOR BACK
A serial record from the validation bench — lightly condensed, translated to English. The module proves its neural network at boot (golden PASS), reports motion with distance and pressure events with their scores, announces a torn-out sensor within a second — and recovers it by itself when plugged back, no reset.

Against what is on the market

ProductWhat it sees
Magnetic contactsOne per opening, wired to every frame.
PIRSomeone already inside — if the lens sees them, and the room is not warm.
Glass-breakOnly glass, only breakage. A key is invisible.
Acoustic sensorsThey record. In the EU that opens a discussion nobody wants.
BaroAware CoreThe opening itself — the moment the envelope is breached.
BaroAware FusionThe opening itself AND the person inside — with distance, from one point.

BA-FUSION-01 — the module

Engineering-validated. The pressure chain has run for months in a real, occupied building. The radar channel is walk-validated to 8.5 m in real rooms. The fusion firmware — both channels concurrent on the XM125 core — is validated end-to-end on the bench, including sensor-loss fail-safe and automatic recovery.

HardwareAcconeer XM125 (A121 60 GHz pulsed-coherent radar + STM32L431 Cortex-M4F host) + Bosch BMP581 barometric sensor
Supply3.3 V. The radar transmits, so it draws more than the ~11 mA pressure-only Core — tens of mA continuous, duty-cycling available. Measured production figures will be published, not estimated.
InterfaceUART: one status line per second plus events in plain text. Alarm signalling with distinct patterns per cause — motion, pressure event, self-diagnosed fault. Normally-closed semantics: a dead module is an alarm, not a silence.
Self-testGolden network check at every boot · hardware watchdog · automatic sensor recovery
Product codeBA-FUSION-01

One regulatory difference from the pressure-only Core, stated plainly: this module contains a radio, so RED applies to the finished product. The A121 transmits roughly one milliwatt average — a level exempt from MPE testing at the FCC — and 60 GHz radiation is non-ionizing. The compliance path is well travelled.


What it does not do

The pressure channel tells you that something was opened — not which. The radar covers the room it is mounted in; drywall is partially transparent, masonry ends the coverage. A perfectly still person produces no motion signal, as with any motion sensor. And we are not quoting a false-alarm figure here: an honest one depends on the site, the season and the settings — we would rather show you the field data.


Where it fits

Licensing & OEM

Available to integrators and OEMs as: evaluation units · pre-programmed modules for your own product · technology licensing · joint development. The detection technology — the signal chain, the trained models and the field dataset — remains with Micro-Elements; you build the product around it.

The fastest way to judge it: put a unit on a desk, open a door in the next room, watch the pressure event arrive — then walk back in and watch the radar call your distance. Ask for an evaluation unit.