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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, July 20, 2009

Not tweeting but chirping

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An announcement from Berlin-based Nanotron caught my eye with a product category I hadn’t noticed before; the headline refers to “Loss Protection Solutions”. Loss protection, it transpires – you are probably ahead of me on this one – means keeping track of your assets – people, animals, valuable items – using RFID-type techniques, with refinements.
A couple of years ago, Nanotron managed to get the relevant IEEE committee to accept its proposal for a chirp-modulation scheme into the specification for IEEE 802.15.4, 2.4-GHz, low-power radio system. Chirp in this context meaning, a swept-frequency modulation signal. At the time, Nanotron’s presentation majored on the robustness that using chirp modulation gave to the RF link; it could maintain data transmission with a much poorer S/N ratio than other techniques.
Not many users seem to have bought into using the chirp modulation for that reason. (Maybe they should have called it “tweet” modulation – that seems to have caught on recently.) Now, Nanotron appears to be focussing on the other attribute of the scheme – its ability to provide accurate ranging. Chirped signals are, after all, exactly what many radars use.
The product Nanotron has launched is the nanoPAN 5375 integrated 2.4GHz transceiver with up to 100 mW of output power, that connects via an SPI interface to a microcontroller, forming a complete Loss Protection subsystem with a few external components. You can accurately estimate the distance between two or more radio nodes, as well as providing communication. There is a trade-off; you can have long-each ranging with data rates of 250 kbps or high-throughput ranging at 1 Mbps. For harsh environments with lots of interference, it also supports a very robust, 250 kbps, communication-only mode. A Software Support Pack combines the basic ranging and communication functions, on a modular basis, with sample code to accelerate software development.
You can build a simple protection system which triggers if the distance between two battery-powered radio nodes is greater than – or less than, if proximity is your problem – a pre-set distance. Add more nodes and, presumably, you can start writing the code to carry out triangulation and establish your valued objects’ exact positions.

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