Seeking Feedback -- Would You Be interested in Roadtesting a Bluetooth®︎5-capable Dev Board?

Not intending to sound disrespectful or demeaning, but this is board is kinda interesting due to small size and battery optimization, but otherwise just seems another CPU packaged with a couple sensors and LEDs. 

robogary said:

just seems another CPU package

I will candidly admit, we ask ourselves this a lot and it has been a challenge for the past ten or so years.

"This is a processor with some connectivity, what difference is it to... this other one?"

Perhaps that's part of the roadtest.

Though, frankly I've just seen this has an accelerometer/gyro on it. That always catches my interest. 

It is a powerful MCU in a small form factor with BT5 and some sensors. I think are tons of uses for such a module and that makes it attractive to road test and have in your tool box, and the price is right.

I used several similar boards from Maxim (ADI). They are good but Maxim MCUs are not easiest to develop on. Some their FTHR boards have unique peripherals like microphone, audio codec, flash memory, advanced ADC, and so on. Often they contains tons of other interesting chips from Maxim (ADI). MAX32666FTHR has IMU, but it's main feature is BLE directly driven from maxim MCU, I think. On some older FTHR board, BLE is achieved by external modules.

It is the same board which you gave to randomly selected winners of IO-Link quiz. Gough Lui  and dang74  wrote about it very interesting blogs (which both are in scope of RoadTest review):

 Surprise Delivery: Maxim Integrated/ADI MAX32666FTHR Application Platform Unboxing 

 The MAX32666FTHR and My Introduction to Bluetooth 

I did not win it, but I have some other similar FTHR boards. Here are some my projects and blogs in which I used Maxim FTHR boards:

MAX78000FTHR:  Blog #14: Gesture Controlled Pacman 

MAX32620FTHR:  Blog #7: Debugging Maxim’s Firmware Framework Crash

MAX32655FTHR:  Mini Solar Powered Wireless Temperature Sensor 

Depending on free time, I am interesting in RoadTesting MAX32666FTHR or other FTHRs which I do not have yet.

Yes, a good device it is.

In Bluetooth, I think that Bluetooth SIG has already released standard 5.4. The bluetooth5 itself has several new features included than from previous one(Bluetooth 4). One of them is that it is capable of direction finding. There are basically two methods for direction finding AOA and AOD. Both require special antenna design requirements to be more accurate.

This board in my understanding is similar to the one from SILabs that has EFR32 microcontrollers.

www.silabs.com/.../thunderboard-gg12-kit

Was checking specs... it has a Dual Arm Cortex-M4F. Awesome. It also has 3 x QSPI! Now that's interesting.

The catch with a previous BLE enabled board (MAX32630FTHR) of theirs was that it used a separate BLE module (PAN1326B), which was not easy to get working. In this case it looks like the BLE radio is integrated.

It would be interesting to see someone blog about using BT5 in a direction-finding application.

Very hard to implement with Maxim MCU according to my experience. Open source BLE stack which they provide has very limited support for advanced features. Last year, they even removed text "supporting LE Audio, angle of arrival (AoA), and angle of departure (AoD) for direction finding" from MAX32655 datasheet (document rev. 2 has it, rev. 3 has not).

I recommed setting goals lower. Working with such open-source stack is very hard and you will be happy when implementing basic GATT in less than 3 workdays (except running basic examples, of course). The minimalistics example has over 1700 lines of codes in multiple files, and it runs only basic build-in services.

I don't have a use for it. I have another board for Maxim and I've never done anything with it...

Other: No free time far all the paperwork.