Kit for Bluetooth direction finding evaluation

Mouser now stocks the XPLR-AOA-1 Explorer Kit from u-blox. The new kit makes it easy to evaluate the potential of Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding and high-precision indoor positioning to allow applications such as collision detection, access control, smart appliances, and asset tracking.

The kit includes an antenna board with a u-blox NINA-B411 Bluetooth Low Energy module, transmitter tag with NINA-B406 Bluetooth Low Energy module, and u-connectLocate direction-finding software. The software operates directly on the NINA-B411 module’s embedded Nordic Semiconductor nRF52833 SoC, calculating the AoA of the incoming signals with no further processing needed.

Engineers can produce a full positioning system by combining several of the kits and triangulate the directions from three or more antenna boards. Applications comprise detecting whether a person or an object is approaching a door, avoiding collisions between moving objects, and directing a camera at a moving tag.