Hi, I’m working on a project that where a robot with 3 or 4 UWB anchors would be able to track and follow a person with a UWB tag.
For this robot, would it be possible to connect the necessary pins from the anchor DWM1000 or DWS1000s directly to a large enough Arduino due or mega?
Alternatively, would it instead be better to connect anchors to their own micro controllers before connecting them to the ‘master’ arduino via serial communication? Is there any other way to do this that would not involve connecting to WiFi?
Any advice would be appreciated,
Thank you for your help
You could connect them all to one processor, other than the chip select and interrupt line the connections between them could all be common so you don’t even need that many pins. But this implies the SPI busses are fairly long which decreases the maximum speed you can run them at. Putting each on it’s own bus would require a processor with 4 SPI interfaces and would simplify signal integrity issues but still implies fairly long connections.
A low SPI bus speed isn’t automatically an issue but does limit the maximum update rate since all your interactions to the radio are slower.
Personally I’d put a smaller microcontroller right next to each radio module. This will cost more but 1) lets you use something less prone to signal integrity issues than SPI for the long connections, 2) makes your system design a lot more modular and so easier to debug and 3) gives you a lot more flexibility, you can easily add more anchors if needed.
I’d also look at something multi-drop like CAN rather than Uart / RS232 for the connections between parts. It’s more of a pain to deal with but doesn’t require one port per anchor on your central processor.
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It is possible to connect the DWM1000 or DWM1001 modules to an Arduino Due or Mega for use in a UWB tracking system. To do this, you will need to connect the necessary pins on the module to the corresponding pins on the Arduino.
The DWM1000 module has a total of 20 pins, including power, ground, and various digital and analog input/output (I/O) lines. You will need to connect the power, ground, and I/O lines in order to communicate with the module and use its features.
Alternatively, you could connect the anchors to their own microcontrollers and then use serial communication to connect the microcontrollers to the “master” Arduino. This would allow you to offload some of the processing to the individual microcontrollers and potentially make the system more scalable.
Keep in mind that both of these options will require some programming on the Arduino to properly communicate with and control the DWM1000 or DWM1001 modules.
As for the communication between the anchors and the tag, it is possible to use UWB technology to transmit data between the anchors and the tag without using WiFi. UWB technology is a type of radio communication that can transmit data over short distances with high accuracy and low power consumption.
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