Multiple Anchor initiators a good thing?

Hi Guys,

I’ve been working with the DWM1001C a fair amount of time (we embedded it in an Android Tablet with a direct comms interface to its CPU) and it behaves pretty solid.

We normally put fixed anchors at known positions inside a room/building and when the Android tablets come in range (these tablets are configured as Tags), they can determine their distance to these Anchors and respond accordingly. Most of the times we do not require the tablet to know its location inside a room and a certain distance to a ‘‘stand-alone’’ anchor is sufficient. Only sometimes we require the tablet to know its exact location and at those places, we put 4 anchors inside approx 50 m² to form what I call a ‘‘grid’’. We use PANS2 and when inside the range of such a grid, the Lec command comes back with its location. Absolutely spot on. Still makes my eyes misty. UWB is the holy grail of indoor ‘‘GPS’’

My ‘‘problem’’ is how to make proper use of the Initiator function of an Anchor. Currently (we’re all lazy to a degree and RTFM seems to conflict with human DNA… in my mediocre defense, the manual is quite extensive…) we set all anchors as Initiator (just to be sure?) as most of them are not used to be part of a location grid but as a single distance ranging ‘‘beacon’’

What we notice is that 4 anchors in a grid, all set to Initiator, often work fine for several hours and then seem to ‘‘vanish’’ from the Tag’s Lec list of nearby Anchors. A quick reset of the Anchor that ‘‘vanished’’, seems to bring it back. For a while…

I’m guessing it has something to do with all of them having the Initiator function set. Is that correct? I am now running extensive tests with a grid of 4 Anchors where only 1 is set as an Initiator and so far, none of the Anchors has ‘‘vanished’’. I just wanted to see if there is some shared knowledge on this topic

Eric

Hi @Eric1968
well sometime RTFM is needed to understand the complex system :joy:.

Regarding your question) There is no direct answer, but the generic recommendation is to have max two initiators in range with each other. If they are not in range they you can experience some weird behavioral with network desynchronization, multiple networks with same PANID but not working well and so on.

Could you post some floor plan with anchors?

Cheers
JK