This $29 Board Is Like a Hackable AirTag

Sticking an AirTag on something is a great way to keep track of it. You’ll never lose your keys or have trouble finding your car in a packed parking lot again if they are equipped with one. However, Apple isn’t exactly known for developing open hardware. If you want to play in their ecosystem, you have to stay within their walled garden.

So, what can you do if you have ideas for a better device, with new capabilities, that still works on the Apple Find My network? You might want to check out the new nRF54L15 Tag created by Nordic Semiconductor. It is a small and inexpensive battery-powered, dual-antenna development board that supports Bluetooth Channel Sounding, so it is compatible with the Apple Find My and Google Find Hub networks.

The board is built around the nRF54L15 wireless SoC and comes equipped with nearly everything needed to start experimenting with low-power location-aware products. It measures just 33 mm in diameter and runs from a standard CR2032 coin-cell battery. Despite its small size, it packs in a six-axis IMU, a low-power accelerometer for motion-triggered wake-up, an environmental sensor, a user-programmable button, and an RGB LED. Nordic has also provided footprints for optional hardware such as additional buttons, external memory, a buzzer, and extra LEDs.

Find My and Find Hub are crowdsourced location networks that rely on nearby smartphones to detect and anonymously report the location of compatible devices, eliminating the need for power-hungry GPS hardware. Nordic already provides software support for using these networks through the nRF Connect SDK, and the new tag serves as a ready-made hardware platform for developers exploring those ecosystems.

The dual-antenna design was specifically developed to support Bluetooth Channel Sounding, a Bluetooth 6.0 technology that enables precise distance measurements between devices. That capability could be useful for item finding, proximity detection, secure access systems, and asset tracking applications where knowing the exact distance to an object is important.

Beyond tracking, the nRF54L15 Tag can also serve as a platform for edge AI projects. Data from the onboard sensors can be used for gesture recognition, vibration monitoring, anomaly detection, and other machine learning applications. Nordic says the hardware is compatible with its nRF Edge AI tools and can run embedded machine learning models directly on the device.

Matter and Thread support are also available out of the box. Combined with the onboard environmental sensor, developers can use the board to prototype smart home devices such as weather stations, environmental monitors, or other battery-powered sensors that integrate into modern Matter-based ecosystems.

To help accelerate development, Nordic ships the board with preloaded firmware, documentation, schematics, PCB layout files, Gerber files, and a complete bill of materials. Programming and debugging can be performed using several Nordic development kits or a SEGGER J-Link debugger, while over-the-air firmware updates are also supported.

The nRF54L15 Tag is currently selling for $29.