Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning kit and reference design

Available now from Mouser, the u-blox XPLR-AOA-3 Bluetooth Direction Finding Explorer Kit and Reference Design includes boards for Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning, featuring the NINA-B4 module. The kit lets users evaluate the ANT-B10 antenna board and the company's optimised direction-finding algorithm. The kit is also a comprehensive AoA anchor point reference design.

The kit includes an ANT-B10 antenna board, an EVBANT-1 development board, and a C209 AoA tag. Also, all required software for operating the kit is included.

The antenna board provides an array comprising eight patch antennas and the NINA-B411 Bluetooth 5.1 module. The board is intended for commercial end-product integration through enabled low-power, high-precision indoor positioning. It quickens evaluating, testing, and commercialising Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning solutions. Developers can efficiently execute its angle calculation algorithm using the u-connectLocate software, which runs on the Bluetooth module.

The application board offers developers a quick and easy way to evaluate the ANT-B10 antenna board. The board provides the NXP RT1061 MCU for configuring and developing direction-finding applications, an Ethernet PHY chip, and a MAYA-W1 Wi-Fi module. An off-the-shelf pin header on EVB-ANT-1 allows easy connection to ANT-B10, delivering a ready-to-use AoA indoor positioning anchor point in seconds.

The C209 is a tag established on the NINA-B406 Bluetooth LE module. The tag runs software that sends out Bluetooth 5.1 advertisement messages for reception by the antenna board, which will then select the direction of the tag through the u-connectLocate software.

The kit can explore many different indoor positioning applications. For instance, it can detect if an object is approaching a door, keep track of goods passing through a gate, avoid collisions between automated guided vehicles, or let a camera follow an asset moving in a room. A positioning system can be created by combining several kits and triangulating the directions from three or more

antenna boards.