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]

You may want to consider the mathematics of the Time Of Flight calculations.

The speed of light is approx 300,000,000 meters per second in a vacuum and only slightly slower in air.

So for 1m resolution, you need a system clock of at least 300MHz and in real world scenarios, you would need at least 2 or 3 time higher clock rates, and probably more like 5+ time clock rate to get 1m resolution.

Plus you would need to have to synchronise the clock in both the TX and RX side, and hold those clocks stable to a reasonable accuracy over long enough periods of time ( unless you intend to constantly resync)

Don't get me wrong. This is technically possible with the correct hardware..

But general purpose Bluetooth MCUs are not the right hardware.

IMHO. To add the functionality you are looking for, to general purpose MCUs would hugely increase the cost and make them not commercially viable.