Pettee Launches a Wireless, Four-Inch Accuracy, Arduino-Compatible Ultra-Wideband Positioning Board

Supplied as a kit with case, wireless charger, battery, and the board itself, Pettee's positioner includes on-board IMU.

Gareth Halfacree
2 years ago β€’ HW101 / Sensors

Pettee Manufacturing has launched an ultra-wideband positioning board, built around Decawave's DWM1000 transceiver and an STMicro STM32F4 microcontroller: the Pettee UWB Board.

"The Pettee Ultra-Wideband (UWB) board utilizes an STM32F401RBT6 microcontroller making it fast and allowing it to run powerful applications," the company writes of its design. "It is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE using the Pettee UWB custom board definition which includes example sketches that demonstrate functionality for all of the integrated peripherals of the board. Additionally, this board is fully compatible with STM32CubeIDE, ProjectIO (Visual Studio Code), and any other IDE that supports flashing STM32 MCU based boards."

Unlike rivals, the Pettee UWB Board is being sold as a ready-to-run kit: In addition to the development board itself, the company is bundling a 3.7V 1.2Ah lithium-ion battery and a PLA enclosure for protection. Charging is handled by a built-in battery management system, with support for wireless charging.

The bonus features don't stop there: The company has also included a six-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU), a buzzer/vibrator module for haptic feedback, two user-addressable single-color LEDs in red and green respectively, and easy access to the microcontroller's I2C, USART, and JTAG ports.

Pettee claims a four-inch positioning accuracy, but that's only achievable using multiple boards: A single board in "tag" mode combined with three "anchors." The microcontroller, meanwhile, runs at 84MHz and offers 64kB of RAM and 128kB of program storage β€” but you'll need to pick up a Serial Wire Debug (SWD) programmer, such as the ST-Link V2, to get it running your code.

The Pettee UWB isn't the first ultra-wideband positioning board we've seen of late: At the tail end of last year Makerfabs announced its own UWB positioning module, built around an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller and offering the same claimed four-inch accuracy. Like the Pettee, it's based around the Decawave DWM1000 transceiver β€” but lacks the Pettee's six-axis IMU, battery management system, wireless power support, and buzzer/vibrator.

The Pettee UWB Board bundle is now available to purchase on the company's Tindie store at $69.99; source code is due to be published to GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3, but at the time of writing had not yet been uploaded.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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