Direction finding explorer kit with NINA-B4 Bluetooth 5.1 module
With the XPLR-AOA-1 explorer kit you can evaluate and experiment with the Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding feature. The kit comprises an antenna board (C211) and a tag (C209) as well as the necessary software for leveraging the angle-of-arrival (AoA) technology in your specific application.
With the AoA technology, an anchor point containing an antenna array connected to a Bluetooth receiver can detect the direction, or angle, to a moving tag transmitting a signal with an appended Constant Tone Extension (CTE).
The XPLR-AOA-1 kit provides you with everything needed to get started evaluating the AoA technology. The C209 tag based on the NINA-B406 Bluetooth LE module and an example software will send out Bluetooth 5.1 advertisement messages. The C211 antenna board is equipped with a NINA-B411 Bluetooth LE module, which receives the messages and applies an angle calculation algorithm to extract the direction to the tag. The angle is calculated by the u-connectLocate software, running on the embedded MCU in NINA-B411. No additional processing is required; the angle is delivered directly from the USB port of the C211 board. The algorithm calculates the angles in two dimensions by using the full array of antennas on the C211 board.
The XPLR-AOA-1 kit can be used to explore many different applications. For example, 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 XPLR-AOA-1 kits and triangulating the directions from three or more C211 boards.
Included in the kit:
- C211 antenna board with NINA-B411 Bluetooth LE module
- C209 tag with NINA-B406 Bluetooth LE module
- u-connectLocate direction finding software (from u-blox.com)
- C209 tag software example (from Github)
