This week, my teammates and I were able to mostly finalize the parts that we will be using for our project. I proposed the use of a microwave sensor to the team, and after discussions and research about its abilities and pros and cons, we decided to switch our design to an array of 2 microwave sensors. To potentially reduce code complexity, we also added an Arduino to our system in order to drive the LEDs using manufacturer drivers, since those are readily available for Arduino.
The progress in deciding parts has enabled me to confirm that the STM32 development board we initially picked out has enough ports to read inputs on both microwave sensors and control the Arduino LED driver, and enough capability to process the required data.
I had discussions with Albany, who is currently working on signal processing code, about the potential need to store many scans from the sensor to accurately filter out the ground, which might be present in our microwave sensor readings. We concluded that it will not be of an immediate concern, since we have 512KB of memory to work with, while each data array from both microwave sensors is only 252 bytes long. We also decided on using C to develop the algorithm, with more complex processing written in Matlab and generated into C code.