XPLR-AOA-3 - Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding explorer kit with antenna board and development platform
The u-blox XPLR-AOA-3 kit is a new addition to the XPLR-AOA product family, featuring the new generation of boards designed by u‑blox for Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning. Users can evaluate the new ANT-B10 antenna board as well as the u‑blox optimised direction-finding algorithm. It also serves as a complete Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) anchor point reference design.
The XPLR-AOA-3 kit can be used to explore many different indoor positioning 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. This means that a positioning system can be created by combining several XPLR-AOA-3 kits and triangulating the directions from three or more ANT-B10 antenna boards.
- Evaluation of ANT-B10 Bluetooth Low Energy antenna board
- Angle-of-arrival anchor point reference design
- Includes application board with powerful MCU and a variety of connectivity options
- Includes Bluetooth 5.1 angle-of-arrival tag
- u-connectLocate software with optimized direction-finding algorithm
- High resolution angle calculation in two dimensions
Learn more about Bluetooth Indoor Positioning
The direction finding explorer kit includes:
- ANT-B10 antenna board with NINA-B411 Bluetooth LE module
- EVB-ANT-1 development platform with NXP RT1061 MCU
- C209 tag with NINA-B406 Bluetooth LE module
- u-connectLocate direction finding software
- C209 tag software example (from Github)
The ANT-B10 antenna board features an antenna array comprising eight individual patch antennas as well as the u‑blox NINA-B411 Bluetooth 5.1 module. Designed for integration into commercial end-products, the board enables low power, high precision indoor positioning and speeds up evaluation, testing, and commercialization of Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning solutions. Using the u-connectLocate software, which runs on the Bluetooth module, developers can easily execute the u‑blox angle calculation algorithms.
The EVB-ANT-1 application board offers developers a quick and easy way to evaluate the ANT-B10 antenna board. It features the NXP RT1061 MCU for configuring and developing direction finding applications, as well as an Ethernet PHY chip and u‑blox MAYA-W1 Wi-Fi module. An off-the-shelf pin header on EVB-ANT-1 allows easy connection to ANT-B10, yielding a ready-to-use AoA indoor positioning anchor point in seconds.
The C209 is a tag based on the NINA-B406 Bluetooth LE module. It runs software that sends out Bluetooth 5.1 advertisement messages for reception by the ANT-B10 antenna board, which will then determine the direction of the tag via the u-connectLocate software.
