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

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

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

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 recall looking into this a couple of years ago. From what I recollect, you need a special dual or triple antenna design for this work where you switch from one antenna to the next and monitor strength of received signal in each antenna. I asked a forum question about tips on how to design a switching circuit, which received some good feedback. It's yet another one of my little projects that never got completed.

 How to build a simple low cost reliable antenna switching circuit 

As misaz has said very hard to implement. It requires special antennas as well as API support. SILABs have some good documentation on that...

www.silabs.com/.../aoa-direction-finding-lab

I was interested at that time too! Pandemic was causing a lot of IC availability issues. I think I eventually decided on which bits to use, and ordered them, but never got around to finding time to work on this, it took so long for all the bits to arrive (and it takes re-learning to recall what the original plan was!). This would take a lot of planning to execute, so it's unfortunately at the back of the queue currently, although it's a highly useful technology!

Hopefully lower-cost eval boards with the built-in antennas+switches become available to save having to do so much desigh effort.

I recall that those SP3T switches are tiny, making it almost impossible to hand solder (well for me, anyway). I've been using JLCPCB PCBA service quite a bit recently and it's pretty good if you don't mind spending a bit extra. I must check to see if JLPCB have any of the switches in stock (their range of stock has improved of late too) then I'll get my little board fabricated and assembled. It's very quick too - from order to receipt of finished product is about a week or so.

I once gave an interview for PhD that deals with localisation using Bluetooth technology. In that, I learned so much about this technology. 

Would be interesting in the future, if this data is fused with GPS to find indoor location of an asset.