We are proud to introduce ANT-B10, a self-contained Bluetooth low energy antenna board for high precision indoor positioning. 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.

Built around the u-blox NINA-B411 Bluetooth 5.1 module, ANT-B10 features an antenna array comprising eight individual patch antennas. After processing incoming RF signals emitted by mobile tracker tags in the module’s radio and angle calculation processor, the solution outputs the calculated angle of arrival without requiring any additional processes.

Together with ANT-B10, we are releasing the XPLR-AOA-3 explorer kit. It features an application board that offers a quick and easy way to evaluate and test the ANT-B10 antenna board, as well as u-blox’s direction finding algorithm, u-connectLocate. 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 generates a ready-to-use AoA indoor positioning anchor point in seconds.

ANT-B10 and XPLR-AOA-3 complement the existing u-blox indoor positioning offering, which includes the XPLR-AOA-1 and XPLR-AOA-2 kits.

Common use cases for Bluetooth indoor positioning and direction finding 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.

The ANT-B10 boards are available today – sampling of ANT-B10 has already begun.

Key highlights

• Self-contained Bluetooth Low Energy board for direction finding and indoor positioning
• Designed for integration into commercial end-products
• Compact eight-element antenna array
• Built around the NINA-B4 Bluetooth 5.1 module
• Embedded AoA calculation with u-connectLocate
• Outputs final angles, ready to be used on application level
• High immunity to multipath effects