Can we use nRF52840 DK for both Indoor positioning and BLE mesh applications

[shivashankar]

Hi,

I work with nRF52840 DKs and I am working for indoor positioning system based on RSSI signal strength. I want the RSSI signal strength to be sensed and transmitted to gateway using nRF Mesh.

Assumption is there are many nRF52840 ble anchors deployed in an area for indoor positioning application.

My question is, can we use nRF52840 based ble anchors to sense the RSSI signal strength and transmit it to the gateway using nRF mesh using nRF52840 based ble anchors itself.

Shiva 

[Marius Heil]

Hello,

this will certainly work. I have been working on this topic for a few years now and we use our custom open source mesh FruityMesh to connect all the devices together. We are then collecting the RSSI measurements from nearby tags (some running nRF52840, some nRF52832) and sending them to a gateway where we process the measurements.

Be aware however that we have been working on this multiple years now and that it requires a lot more effort that you could originally think of ;-)

Things to deal with are:

- RSSI noise / reflection / other instabilities

- A large number of collected measurements that will need a high bandwidth in the mesh which you need to optimize and reduce

- Standstill tags that are hard to stabilize, so you need to use accelerometer and other techniques to find out if a tag is moving.

- A huge effort to preprocess and filter the raw data, e.g. use wall maps, other calibration data, .... to get a good position.

Marius

[shivashankar]

thanks marius for your input

[tesc]

Hi,

As already mentioned by Marius Heil, what you describe should be possible, yes, but please be warned that RSSI measurements for positioning is a hard area with a lot of challenging issues to be solved, especially if you want accuracy better than a few metres.

Regards,
Terje