Digi-Key at Embedded World 2022 with u-blox

5th July 2022

u-blox

Paige West

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At embedded world 2022, on the Digi-Key booth, Paige West speaks with Pelle Svensson, Product Marketing/Business Development, Product Centre Short Range and Erik Carlberg, Senior Product Manager, Short Range Radio about a new mystery product, Angle of Arrival, and products with AWS pre-installed.

IoT explorer kit

u-blox recently released an IoT explorer kit, designed to help users get started with their IoT applications. It has cellular connectivity, sensors built in, a GNSS, GPS positioning module, Bluetooth as well as Wi-Fi connectivity and it comes pre-flashed with a software that ties all of these components together.

On top of that, there’s an application that reads the sensor connected to u-blox’s think stream IoT service delivery platform, where the data is captured. You can do some example code where you can develop a visualisation of the sensor data that you have captured.

Angle of Arrival

u-blox’s explorer kit in this area lets users evaluate and experiment with Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding.

Bluetooth 5.1 comes in two flavours: angle of departure and angle of arrival. In this case, u-blox has focused on the angle of arrival that is a technique to determine the direction to a movable object or an asset.

It contains two main parts – there’s an antenna board which is the fixed point and then there is a tag which is then placed on the asset that you want to track, and the tag sends out some Bluetooth 5.1 specific signals which the antenna board can track and use to determine their direction to the tag.

Carlberg said: “This is very exciting because it opens up many new applications we’ve not had before.”

AWS pre-installed

At the end of last year, u-blox announced two modules designed to enable Amazon Web Services Cloud services for device and fleet management out of the box.

There is one Wi-Fi and one cellular module that run the AWS software to easily connect to the AWS Cloud platform. It comes pre-provisioned with all the security features that is required to connect the device to the AWS Cloud service.

For many businesses, connecting devices to the Cloud remains challenging so u-blox’s modules are designed to be very simple to use. A product developer can take one of these modules, set up the connection to Wi-Fi or the cellular and then start a data pipe into the AWS Cloud.