XPLR-AOA-2 - Bluetooth 5.1 indoor positioning explorer kit with NINA-B4 module
The u-blox XPLR-AOA-2 Bluetooth 5.1 indoor positioning explorer kit allows engineers to experiment with Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding technology for indoor positioning use cases. The kit comprises 4 antenna boards (C211) and 4 tags (C209) as well as the necessary software for setting up a system to evaluate Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) technology for high accuracy positioning indoors.
With the direction finding feature, users can take advantage of the robust communication link and low current consumption offered by Bluetooth, to build highly accurate indoor positioning systems that could support various use cases such as asset tracking.
- Evaluation tool for Bluetooth 5.1 indoor positioning
- Includes 4 antenna boards and 4 tags
- High resolution positioning engine
- u-connectLocate software with optimized direction finding algorithm
Learn more about Bluetooth Indoor Positioning
The XPLR-AOA-2 direction finding explorer kit includes:
- 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)
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). Triangulating the directions from three or more anchor points, the position of the tag can be calculated.
The XPLR-AOA-2 kit provides you with everything needed to get started evaluating high accuracy Bluetooth positioning. The C209 tags with NINA-B406 Bluetooth LE modules and example software will send out Bluetooth 5.1 advertisement messages. The C211 antenna boards, equipped with NINA-B411 Bluetooth LE modules, receive the messages and apply 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 positioning engine software provided with the kit runs on an external PC and is accessed through a web browser. The user can upload a room floor plan via the graphical user interface and deploy and configure the antenna boards. The positioning engine collects the angle data from all the antenna boards and uses it to calculate the position of the tags. If the antenna boards are placed in vertical positions, then the position can be calculated in 3D.
