 Hi, I'm MPI. Hi, I'm MPI, brought to you by Digikey. Thank you. Digikey, this week it is Laird Connectivity. Yes. Lady Aida, what is this week's new product introduction? I'm glad you asked. OK, so this week, it's actually kind of a collaboration. This week it's the Sera NX040, which is a combination of the NXPSR040, which we'll talk about, and our favorite, the Nordic NRF series, NRF 52. This is the 833, which is actually more recent than the 840, I believe. There's a USB capable Bluetooth low-energy Cortex M33 or M4 microcontroller. Sorry, I can't remember up top of my head. Of course, with BLE and the ultra low power and great range capabilities and programmability of the Nordic series, teamed up as that's the main core, teamed up with the NXPSR040, which is an ultra-wideband radio front end that can also talk about various positioning. And then Laird Connectivity put this all together in a certified, ready to pick in place, antenna-ified module so you can get started with ultra-wideband projects really quickly. OK, so ultra-wideband, what is that? Well, it's like those pants from JNCO, they're like ultra-wide leg. These are ultra-wideband. This is a radio system that blasts data over. You'll see like a gigahertz wideband width. And it can transmit and receive data. And it's not the same as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, which is like 2.4 gigahertz. And it's not Lora, which is usually like 900 megahertz or maybe 433. It's much higher frequency, so it's very near, very short distances. You guys get to hear it three times. OK, it's launching with ultra-wideband, specifically for doing small-scale location. Because if you want to do geolocation with GPS or you want to do cellular triangulation with self-towers, you have to be outdoors. You have to have network access or you have to have a GPS fix. You have to have good connectivity to the sky or whatever. And you also get 10 meters best range. You can also do Wi-Fi or Bluetooth though energy time of flight detection. That'll get you a little bit better, but it's still going to be like within a meter or two. Also, usually, you can't tell which door. Actually, you can just tell overall distance. Like, oh, it is 10 meters away or 20 meters away, but you don't know exactly where within a 3D space the target is. And then with ultra-wideband, what's really neat is especially if you have multiple anchor tags, you can actually do centimeter level indoor positioning where within an indoor space where you don't necessarily have, you can be in a basement, you can be in a tower or whatever. Or you can do it outside, of course, but specifically indoors, it's great. You set up multiple anchor tags and you can detect where in 3D space objects are within that space. And this ultra-wideband is one of the few technologies that can actually do that kind of positioning, that kind of precision indoors. OK. So it does this basically by sending data and then looking for the bounce to apply. You can't get anything out like time of flight or distance detection with other RF signals. So that's not unusual. But what's nice is because it's ultra-wideband, it's got this extra bandwidth because it's a high frequency. It can actually do a little bit more security. So instead of just sending a random ping, it can do challenge responses or encryption and have packet data that's a little bit more complicated than just a simple echo ping or advertisement like in Bluetooth or Energy, which means it can be more secure. And so I actually did a little bit of reading about how the ultra-wideband with location works. And what's neat is the data is sent and it's like this beautiful sync pulse. And the pulse shape is like a tune in a way so that you get no frequency outside the band. So yes, it does use this ultra-wideband, but the energy level overall is quite low because it's spread out over this wide frequency. And because you have this wide frequency and you can detect pulses in the different parts of the frequency band that you're transmitting in, if you do have bounces or you have something that is opaque or transparent to a certain frequency, other frequencies might be able to get around it or through it. And so part of the calculation you have to do with ultra-wideband is managing the reflections because you're going to get like a direct path bounce. Then you might get reflective bounces and then you have to do the math to figure out like, okay, well, based on the frequency and which pulse and the data, what is the actual distance and where are you with relation to the other ultra-wideband module that's like transmitting or receiving the pulses? And that's what's really nice about the NX040 is it does that all for you. So you don't have to do the math and calculate and figure out like the correlation of all the symbols and data that you're getting. Once you've synced it up with the transmitter, so it all has like the same security key, it'll just tell you like magically like, hey, here you are with XYZ coordinates. Okay, there's basically two ways you might want to use ultra-wideband. There's the single-sided, so this is one-to-one and you have a transmitter, say your car and a receiver that could be like a key fob or a phone in your pocket. And this doesn't do very detailed triangulation, like you can usually, you know, you can definitely do distance and it can usually do like basic direction. You're gonna get like maybe XY and probably not gonna get XYZ coordinates, but it's good for detecting when somebody is nearby and how close they are. And then there is the more advanced difference of arrival calculations. And a lot of people want to talk about ultra-wideband, this is what they mean. You would set up anchor points in this case on the bottom left you see like a one, two, three and four. And those are transmitters or receivers that are looking for signal coming from that cell phone that's kind of wandering around 3D space. And by taking those four bounces of the signal, it can calculate where in 3D space that cell phone is. And so this would be good if you're like, oh, I have a, you know, event space and I wanna track where people are within that event space or I have assets within a factory, I wanna know where that asset is. This is where you would use time difference of arrival. So two different use cases. The previous one tends to be used for like detecting when somebody is nearby for like security purposes, you wanna unlock something because it's like, oh, you've been authenticated and you're nearby. This is a nice comparison from NXP showing the accuracy. You know, they didn't even show GPS or cellular, but that's also in the range of seven to 10 meters. But ultra-wideband, one of the nice things because of that high frequency wide bandwidth and the high bandwidth of data and the smallness of the waveform, you can do much better time of flight detection. So, you know, originally it was for item tracking, but what's interesting is the new use case, you know, in indoor navigation, but some new use cases that are coming in are built smart building services. So detecting when a person is at the door, automatically unlocks or hands-free payments, you don't even have to touch to take your phone on, touch to pay, it just knows that you've, you know, you're walking by and you're authenticated already. So, you know, like we're talking about how in New York City that when you wanna go to the turnstile, you have to put your phone on the tap to pay to go through, but wouldn't it be cool if you just walked to the turnstile and it was like, hey, I can detect that you have an ultra-wide bankable phone, it's, you know, you're within four centimeters. I know that means you're within the turnstile I'm going to let you through. So car access seems to be another technology that's picking up ultra-wideband, especially as cell phones are starting to add ultra-wideband technology because people tend to have their cell phones and may not have their car keys. And what's nice is that ultra-wideband isn't susceptible to the relay attacks that have been like really like a plague on cars. This is like kind of a famous clip of somebody who's caught, they put antenna near the home and they amplify the signal from the key fob that might be next to be left near the door or near the window, and they use that to unlock the car. So ultra-wideband doesn't have this issue because it isn't this simple transmitter receiver. It can actually do authentication within the ultra-wideband frequency. So inside each module, you get the NXP-SRO40, that's the ultra-wideband, connected over SPI to the Nordic NR-52, that's the main core that you're gonna be working with. It also has Bluetooth or energy, which means there's this backhaul because ultra-wideband, even though it has bandwidth, you can't communicate back to like a phone or a computer. So the Nordic NR-52-833 is what you would use to connect a computer, a cell phone or other devices because it has full Bluetooth or energy capability and of course, all the peripherals you need. So NXP has documentation on their TRIMENTION, it's kind of a cool name, the SRO40, ultra-wideband. So what's great is, again, all the calculations are done in chip, communicate over SPI, so you don't have to do that work on the Bluetooth or energy device, you do it on this chip and the communicate over SPI. There's two versions of this module. This one has two antenna ports, so you would use a normal 2.4 gigahertz Bluetooth antenna. For ultra-wideband, you'll want to pick up, Laird has the matching wideband antenna, which I'm assuming when they do the authentication, the certifications for the chips. They use the Santana, so you get to use their certifications, but check out the documentation for that to make sure. But you plug in the Santana and now you can, even if you're in an enclosure or you want to have a better range for the ultra-wideband, because one of the trade-offs is ultra-wideband because it's a high frequency, doesn't have as much range as you're gonna get with 900 megahertz or 433, of course. Both modules are pick-and-placeable. The one that has an antenna, just to make sure, you really want to make sure that you have nothing in that area that can get in the way of the antenna. It's really important that the ultra-wideband antenna is free and clear, because any interference in the antenna is going to affect how good it is at doing the 3D location of devices or the time of flight detection of distances between it and the other paired device. There's also a dev kit available, which I kind of like, has everything you need. It's got a little micro-bice connector. It's got quick, Stem-QT compatible, so you can plug in any of your Adafruit-favorite sensors or devices. You want an OLED or a temperature sensor. Go to town. You'll need, of course, more than one of these. You'll need at least two. They also have a USB dongle, I forgot to mention. So if you want to get data on your computer, the USB dongle will be able to let you run their VAL software to get data from the ultra-wideband device. Without going through cell phone, it does the Bluetooth to USB conversion for you. And best of all, it's in stock. Thank you for being patient through that IonMPI. Someone in the chat said there was a giant internet outage across the entire internet right now, which seemed to be true, because I was like, what's going on? Yeah, but did we give up? No, I didn't give up. Probably want to skip that video, by the way. So that's this week's IonMPI. All right, thanks. Thanks for hanging in there. IonMPI.