GreatScott! Takes on Samsung with a Low-Cost Bluetooth Low Energy Tracker Design
Believing off-the-shelf trackers to be overpriced, Scott designs his own — but it proves more difficult than expected.
YouTuber GreatScott! has decided that off-the-shelf Bluetooth Low Energy beacons are simply too expensive for what they are — and to prove it set about building his own, though the results didn't quite deliver.
"For someone like me who always misplaces things all around the the house, [BLE beacons] can be a real lifesaver because this beacon works easily up to a distance of 25 meters [around 82 feet]," Scott explains. "[The] only problem is that you need more than one of these smart tags to cover all your essentials, and thus this can get expensive quickly. So I was wondering whether I could come up with a DIY version that is not only cheaper but maybe also better, especially considering the battery runtime and detection range."
Taking Samsung's Galaxy Smart Tags as a baseline, Scott started by setting his expectations: his cheaper version of the devices would lack the ability to tie in to a global find-my-device ecosystem, and also the direction finding and precise location tracking of Ultra-Wideband (UWB) connectivity — concentrating wholly on what you can achieve with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) instead.
Scott's creation is based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 microcontroller, "because they are quite popular and their current draws also sound promising," Scott notes, with the added bonus of a small external antenna to help boost signal strength and operating distances over Samsung's off-the-shelf equivalents.
The custom, and suitably compact, circuit board design is based on Nordic's reference schematic — and while it took a few tries, does deliver a working BLE tracker experience. There's a catch, however: "even after trying all power-saving measures it looks like we are drawing quite a bit more current than the [commercial] version, which in this regard is definitely the winner. It [also] seems like I designed the antenna part incorrectly, because I only achieved a range of 5m [around 16 feet]."
Despite its poorer performance than Samsung's off-the-shelf equivalent, Scott has released the design files and source code on Patreon for anyone who would like to build their own tracker — or attempt to figure out how to get Scott's design closer to the performance of an off-the-shelf equivalent. The project as a whole is documented in the video above and on the GreatScott! YouTube channel.