AoA (Angle of Arrival) between nRF5340 and nRF52840

[MicroM]

Dear Community, 

we are looking into an application where the Gateway (RX) uses the nRF5340 + antenna array and the clients (TX) the nRF52840. The clients are on the market already (why we cannot change the wireless SoC) the gateway is an upcoming development.

Is there a way AoA could work (limited) in this constellation as the RX part with the antenna array is the more recent nRF5340? Or is it simply impossible (even with upcoming firmware) because the nRF52840 is missing the silicon even it is working as TX only?

Thanks a lot!

[Elfving]

Hey MicroM!

You can see the list of the SoCs that support direction finding here, and as you can see the nRF52840 is unfortunately not among them. The problem is the HW that doesn't support any way of sending or receiving a CTE that is in compliance with Bluetooth. nRF5340 on the other hand has the HW to support for DF, however there is no support for DF on it in NCS as of now. NCS only supports DF on the 52833.

There are however non-Bluetooth compliant solutions out there that uses standard Bluetooth packets where they insert data in the packet that allows the receiver to use this instead of the CTE. This can be done with the nRF52840, but we will not provide the code for the transmitter/receiver for this option, it will be up to you to do all of this. All necessary information on how to make this work is in the PS.

Best regards,

Elfving