Nordic Chipsets can support Indoor Location Tracking feature?

[Hemamali]

Hi Nordic Team, Can you please share any information regarding Indoor Location Tracking feature/application that nRF52840 can support? does this have AoA/AoD? and can this provide any kind of physical layer time-stamping for ToF/TDoA algorithms? What's the best location accuracy that can be achieved using this silicon? If i want to develop nRF52840 based Indoor Location Tracking application what kind of support i can get from you? What's the preferred module platform? does Nordic supports API for location developers? what's the best LOS & NLOS range one can get using this SoC? Kindly share this information

THanks & Best Regards, Hemamali

[Hemamali]

thanks for your clarification! do you know what's the practical LOS/NLOS range can be achieved using latest Nordic BT5.0 solution? any real deployments based out of BT5.0 happened till now? if yes, what are the challenges seen with Sw timer/RSSI based schemes?

[Roger Clark]

I've been looking at some unrelated RF devices, (motion detectors), and they have big problems with reflections when used indoors.

I suspect that AoA is also going to have the same sort of problem.

The walls in my house have a aluminium foil insulation layer in them, which is a great reflector ! But this is quite a common insulation technique, so I don't think I'm alone in noticing this.

There are some excellent dedicated hardware solutions giving decent ToF distance values, but they cost $$. I also doubt how useful they would be in normal indoor spaces which consist of multiple small rooms e.g. 10m x 10m.

So you'd need to deploy the hardware in each room.