U-blox releases its new NINA-B4 Bluetooth Low Energy module

     U-blox, a leading global provider of positioning and wireless communication technologies, has announced the u-blox NINA-B4 Bluetooth Low Energy module family. The NINA-B4 is powered by Nordic Semiconductor's newly released nRF52833 chip and supports a range of Bluetooth features such as remote communication, Bluetooth mesh and Bluetooth direction finding. The module is tailored for a wide range of application scenarios in the Industrial Internet of Things, smart homes, buildings and cities, asset tracking and e-health. With its unique feature set, the u-blox NINA-B4 standalone module is ideal for indoor positioning applications and is suitable for deployment in harsh environments.

     As one of the new features of the NINA-B4 series, Bluetooth direction Finding is an important upgrade in the Bluetooth v5.1 specification, bringing the benefits of high-precision positioning to a variety of indoor applications. The NINA-B4 is designed to act as both transmitter and receiver in AoA and AoD directional and indoor positioning applications, making it the first of its kind in the u-blox module family.

     In an AoA configuration, a fixed beacon equipped with a multi-antenna array will detect the arrival Angle of the signal transmitted by the tracking device and determine the location of the tracking device with submeter accuracy. If the AoD configuration is adopted, the tracking device calculates the departure Angle of the signal transmitted by the fixed beacon multi-antenna array, so as to triangulate itself.

     Grids, long-distance communication and a wide temperature range u-blox NINA-B4 supports wireless mesh networks that enable reliable communication between a large number of connected devices: messages are "relaying" between multiple nodes and ultimately reaching the target device. Thanks to the simplified control of equipment groups, mesh networks are well suited for applications such as smart lighting systems in cities and buildings, which will further benefit from the module's operating temperature range of up to 105 °C.

     With support for Bluetooth remote communication, NINA-B4 is ideal for deployment in harsh operating environments. For example, configurable devices that can be used to support wireless interconnection. In particular, Bluetooth long-distance communication can not only extend the transmission distance of Bluetooth signals in a interference-free environment, but also achieve more stable and reliable communication under unfavorable conditions (such as factory buildings and production workshops).

     The NINA-B4 series comes bundled with the u-blox uconnect software, which features an easy-to-understand interface to enable users to configure the required connections, making it easier and faster to integrate Bluetooth into new and existing products.

     In addition, the NINA-B4 features a powerful Arm Cortex-M4F MCU and an open CPU architecture, enabling customers to run their own applications on the module. The first products in the NINA-B4 series will support Zigbee and Thread protocols, come with internal PCB antennas, or come with U.F.L connectors for connecting to user-selected external antennas.