The NodeMCU BU01 is an integrated development board consisting of both the BU01 and the STM32F103 microcontroller. The BU01 offers UWB Communication over SPI. The onboard STM32F103 microcontroller can be used to communicate with the BU01 to send/receive data. UWB Ranging offers location positioning up to 10cm accuracy. Perfect and high-resolution alternative to BLE/WiFi Localisation using RSSI. Using 3 or more anchors you can determine the accurate position of a UWB tag indoors/outdoors. If you want to use UWB in your next product, then you can evaluate the technology using this board before you move to a custom board.

The BU01 internally uses the DW1000 IC from Decawave which is highly capable UWB IC. Please check Decawave website for more details.

GPS is available for outdoor positioning, what about indoors? There is a positioning technology that is more accurate than GPS: UWB. The technology offers positioning accuracy within 10cm which greatly compensates for the shortcomings of the indoor RSSI positioning of past IoT products

UWB technology is a wireless carrier communication technology that uses a frequency bandwidth above 1 GHz. It does not use a sinusoidal carrier but uses nanosecond-level non-sinusoidal narrow pulses to transmit data and occupies a large frequency spectrum, hence the name “Ultra-Wideband”, or UWB for shorts. Besides positioning, UWB can also be used for data transmission with a rate of hundreds of megabits per second

The factory firmware support AT commands to retrieve data from the temperature & humidity sensor, and the accelerator.

Features:-

• Simple integration, no RF design required
• Using RTLS infrastructure to expand the communication range
• Support high label density
• Comply with IEEE 802.15.4-2011 UWB standard
• Support 4 channels from 3.5 GHz to 6.5 GHz
• Programmable transmit power
• Power supply 2.8 V to 3.6 V
• Power consumption in sleep mode<1mA
• Support two-way ranging and TDOA
• Support SPI interface
• Data rate 110 kbps, 850 kbps, 6.8 Mbps
• MCU – STMicro STM32F103 Arm Cortex-M3 microcontroller
• UWB module – Ai-Thinker BU01 module
• 50 I/O pins exposed for functions.
• Sensors – Onboard acceleration sensor, temperature, and humidity sensor
• Misc – User buttons and LED
• Power Supply – 5V via Micro USB port

Specifications:-

• Model : NodeMCU-BU01
• Package : DIP-40
• Size : 35x55.5(±0.2)(WxH) mm
• Antenna : PCB antenna
• Frequency range : 3.5GHz to 6.5GHz
• Power Supply : 5V or 3.3V
• Interface : The all IO of PWM/I2C/GPIO 、MCU
• Working Temperature : -40 ℃ ~ 85 ℃
• Storage Environment : -40 ℃ ~125 ℃ , < 90%RH
• Power consumption : Development board :160 mA (with MCU, sensors)

Package Includes:-

1 x  Ai Thinker NodeMCU-BU-01 Development Board