U-blox launches NORA-W10 compact low-power Bluetooth and Wi Fi modules

     U-blox announced the launch of u-blox NORA-W10 Wi Fi 4 and low-power Bluetooth 5.0 module. NORA-W10 module is mainly designed for severe application scenarios in industrial environments, and is an ideal choice to meet the requirements of high RF performance and limited size. In addition, the module is also applicable to medical devices, smart city solutions, warehouses, retail and other applications.

     As a replacement product of the NINA-W10 module, NORA-W10 has added Wi Fi 4 and Bluetooth low-power 5.0, optimized RF performance, built in large capacity flash memory and reduced overall power consumption. The NORA-W10 compact module is developed based on the Espressif ES32-S3 chipset. It is equipped with a powerful dual core MCU and has the AI hardware acceleration function, which can support voice recognition and face recognition applications in the edge environment. In addition, NORA-W10 module provides rich and universal hardware interfaces, including USB, CAN, SDIO, display screen and camera interfaces.

     NORA-W10 provides single band 2.4 GHz Wi Fi 4 (802.11b/g/n), which is targeted at the low-end Wi Fi market segment. Such markets do not need Wi Fi 5 and Wi Fi 6 modules with higher performance and price. With strong on-site Wi Fi communication and data transmission rate to meet the needs of many industrial applications, Wi Fi 4 is expected to be the most widely used Wi Fi technology in IoT applications at least until 2025, and will maintain this position in the foreseeable future.

     Even if it communicates via Wi Fi, NORA-W10 can also provide data transmission function up to 2 Mbps via Bluetooth low-power 5.0 at the same time; If Bluetooth is used for long-distance communication, the signal transmission distance can reach 4 times of the standard low-power Bluetooth. Bluetooth Mesh supports the "relay" transmission of messages between multiple nodes, and finally delivers the messages to the target device, thus further expanding the achievable coverage.

     The module uses dual core Xtensa LX7 MCU, 8 MB flash memory, 512 kb RAM and up to 38 programmable GPIOs. NORA-W10 has passed the global certification and has a number of advanced security functions (including flash encryption function using accelerated encryption and secure boot). It can safely run information sensitive applications in a trusted, isolated environment without any additional components.