In this video, I'll demonstrate my experience of attempting to create a Real-Time Location System using the Decawave DW-1000 Ultra-Wideband transceiver. I'll be using an ESP32 dev board made by MakerFabs, which you buy from www.tindie.com/products/maker...
If you'd like to create your own boards, you can view the PCB schematic of the board at: github.com/Makerfabs/Makerfab...
The DW1000 chip will work with an Arduino or any other microprocessor with an SPI interface. The advantage of using the ESP32 is to take advantage of the built-in WiFi for transmitting data from the tag to a server.
The server is running a Unity project that opens a socket and listens for incoming UDP connections, then reads distance data sent from the UWB tag, encoded as JSON. It uses trilateration to determine the position of the tag and displays that in a visual interface.
You can access the ESP32 code and Unity project I demonstrate in this video at github.com/playfultechnology/...
And my modified version of the DW-1000 library can be found at atgithub.com/playfultechnology/...
Ultimately, I think it's an interesting tech demo but, unfortunately, I wouldn't be prepared to put this device to any production use right now. If you have any advice to help resolve the issues I have with accuracy, range, and robustness then I'd love to hear!
Timings
---
00:00:00 - 00:02:57 Introduction
00:02:58 - 00:05:55 Explanation of the UWB system
00:05:56 - 00:09:12 Testing the ranging accuracy between tag and anchor
00:09:13 - 00:11:03 Measuring and compensating for errors
00:11:04 - 00:31:41 ESP32 Code in the Arduino IDE
00:31:42 - 00:43:49 Unity Project for visualisation
00:43:50 - 00:45:04 Demonstration
00:45:05 - 00:48:12 Conclusions, wrapup, and disappointment!