Bluetooth direction finding for tracker

[Deepak]

We want to design a small tracker for key rings like car keys etc,  it will be linked with mobile app. Is it possible to do so?

Whatever I have read till now is it is possible by AOA and AOD, but both of them require multiple antenna on either side. But in our application there is only one antenna on tracker side & mobile app also has one antenna(I suppose)  or some clever way to do that?

PS: I am new to bluetooth field. I have exp in C programming only at the moment.

[tesc]

Hi,

You are correct that for AoA or AoD (Bluetooth 5.1) you do need one of the ends to use a multiple antenna array. Those would definitely be larger than a key ring. You also need to know the orientation of the object with the antenna array, as the direction is relative to the antenna array's orientation.

For finding items such as key chains, a better approach is usually to use RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) and let the user probe for the device by moving around with their phone and getting feedback on getting closer to or farther away from the object. See e.g. the Proximity Application from our nRF5 SDK.

Regards,
Terje