u-blox antenna board enables Bluetooth positioning indoors
In order to bring reliable indoor positioning devices to market, u-blox offers the ANT-B10 antenna board for Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning applications. The board is designed for integration into commercial end-products and enables low power, high precision indoor positioning. It also speeds up evaluation, testing and commercialisation of Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning solutions, said u-blox.
Bluetooth indoor positioning uses the angle of arrival (AoA) of a Bluetooth direction finding signal emitted by a mobile tag at several fixed anchor points to calculate the tag’s location in real-time with sub-meter accuracy. The technology exploits Bluetooth’s vast ecosystem and interoperability across platforms and is gaining traction due to its low cost, high accuracy and relative ease of installation and maintenance.
The ANT-B10 is a self-contained Bluetooth low energy antenna board for direction finding and indoor positioning. It has an antenna array comprising eight individual patch antennas, and is built around a u-blox NINA-B411 Bluetooth 5.1 module. After processing incoming RF signals emitted by mobile tracker tags in the module’s radio and angle calculation processor, the antenna board outputs the calculated angle of arrival without requiring any additional processes.
The release also includes the XPLR-AOA-3 explorer kit. This features an application board, which offers developers a quick and easy way to evaluate and test the ANT-B10 antenna board, as well as u-blox’s direction finding algorithm. An off-the-shelf pin header on the application board allows for easy bring-up and testing of ANT-B10 and third-party antenna boards. Connecting the two boards yields a ready-to-use AoA indoor positioning anchor point in seconds, added u-blox.
ANT-B10 and XPLR-AOA-3 complement u-blox’s indoor positioning portfolio which includes the XPLR-AOA-1 and XPLR-AOA-2 kits. Developers can use u-connectLocate, which runs on ANT-B10’s Bluetooth module, to execute the angle calculation algorithms using AT commands.
Common use cases for Bluetooth indoor positioning and direction include tracking assets in industrial settings such as in warehouses as well as people and things in hospitals, retail environments, or museums. Additionally, access control systems deployed in connected buildings can use angle detection to determine which side of a door users are located on.
To determine the angle of arrival of incoming signals for direction finding, the ANT-B10 board concurrently processes them on all eight patch antennas. Implementing multiple RF paths connected to multiple RF switches unnecessarily increases power demand and introduces errors, so the ANT-B10 board uses a single RF switch component from CoreHW that cycles through the eight antennas in microseconds.
The ANT-B10 boards are available today.
