That can be complex and tricky to do reliably.
See threads on the forum for issues some have had with wired synchronization, for example:
If you do manage to develop a wired clock distribution scheme, then it does solve the clock drift between nodes, they will always be the same clock rate.
But you do have to learn the offset between nodes since the clock delay to each node will vary even if you take extreme care to match cable lengths. This is because every DW1000 chip has a variation in the clock delay input buffer. Further, cable delay is not uniform and varies from cable to cable, and also with temperature and flexing.
What this means is that even with a distributed clock, you still need some form of periodic over the air synchronization process to keep the anchor nodes precisely time aligned. If you don’t and only perform a one time offset calibration, that will drift over time and temperature leading to less accuracy in location.
If you are going to periodically send packets for calibrating the offset, then you are already generating the data needed to perform modeling of the clocks at each node without needing the wired synchronization. Thus this is the most common approach to the problem and you rarely see systems with wired synchronization.
The most trivial form of over the air synchronization is using a single master time node which periodically broadcasts a time stamp packet. This node is received by all the anchors, which means the anchor array size is limited to one reception radius. As each tag packet is received at anchors, the anchor interpolates the tag received time between two time stamp packets and thus all tag packets end up in the master time node’s time domain.
The above is how our CUWB 2 system worked, single master time node. Later we developed the mesh synchronization algorithm we now use in CUWB 3 which has no reliance on a single master and breaks the single reception radius limitation.
Mike Ciholas, President, Ciholas, Inc
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mikec@ciholas.com
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