Hi Sparkfun,
It looks like Sparkfun has no UWB (Ultra Wide Band) products. I’d be interesting in a feather-form board with UWB in addition to some standard RF (like BLE). The application is measuring distance between multiple robots, persons, or anchors, but without using ultrasonic. As the robots/persons move, then can track how far apart they are. Some folks call this proximity detection.
So far as I know, there are two vendors of an underlying UWB chip. One is Decawave (now Qorvo) with its DWM1000 series. The other is more speculative, just announced at CES this year – the Novelda proximity sensor, a.ka. the Novelda X4: X4 Datasheets - NOVELDA I can’t find anybody selling a board, though the Novelda website does have a form to request an evaluation kit. The datasheet for the Novelda looks really simple, just with they had an application note as well.
There doesn’t seem to be anybody making what I have in mind. Qorvo does sell an affordable DWM1001-DEV board, but it’s kind of bulky (2.5x2 inches) compared to a feather form factor, and the processor (nRF52832) doesn’t have the memory that later versions in nRF52 (or nRF53 etc) have, with 256KB RAM.
– Ted
MakerFabs offers ESP32-DW1000 modules that work very well. https://www.makerfabs.com/esp32-uwb-ultra-wideband.html
I used them to implement a 3D positioning system for Arduino, but ran into a problem with the DW1000 library that limits the number of anchors to four. Unfortunately the library does not seem to be supported by the author, and I have not been able to track down the error.
https://github.com/jremington/UWB-Indoo … on_Arduino
Decawave/Qorvo does not seem to be interested in the hobby community.
Excellent response JRemington!
Yes, the limited number of anchors would be a killing limitation. I did not find examples of non-anchor (mobile) doing ranging with other non-anchor units, which is another use-case that I need. The board doesn’t appear to be as friendly to Li-Po battery power as I would hope. I think Sparkfun could do a much better job than Makerfabs has done.
Possibly, but the library limitation is a killer, and I have not able to follow the logic completely, and don’t have access to a good debugging interface for ESP32.
I’ve posted an issue on Thomas Trojer’s Github page for the DW1000, and hope he will be interested to track down the error.