ANT Forum

Good Morning (at least in GMT -6).

I have a project that my company is working on and I think Ant may be the radio solution that we have been looking for. Been doing some research but I am hoping that the experts here can give me a quick answer as to whether Ant will work for my application.

Our business idea is a little sensitive so I can't give the exact details but hopefully my question is clear.

I want to use Ant as a proximity detection technology. I will have a "master node" that has roughly the processing power and IO capabilities of a modern smartphone. I will have hundreds of simple slave nodes that do nothing more than transmit their unique ID, maybe something as simple as a 1-wire prom.

I want the master node to periodically at a very low rate scan his area using the proximity feature and record what nodes are closest to him. Time resolution can be on the order of 10-15 minutes.

I don't need exact radii, I just need relative radii. I want to know that 15 minutes ago there were 0 nodes withing radius 1 and slaves 1, 2, and 3, were in radius 1. And now slaves 4, 5, and 6 are in radius 1... etc.

Slave nodes should be cheap, durable, and have as long a battery life as possible (5-6 years would be ideal). The master node is not nearly as constrained. It would be a vertical market so the master node is not as price sensitive as a commercial market.

I'm still learning about Ant but I would really appreciate any opinions on my technical feasiblity.

Hopefully that is clear, thanks for your time.      

Hello,

This project is perfectly feasible with ANT. There are several options for the application that you are describing; in particular Proximity Search and Extended Messaging.

Trasmitter:

ANT is an ultra low power wireless sensor solution. As such it has a relatively long battery. Please take a look at the power estimator here:

http://www.thisisant.com/calculator/

If you find this is not quite what you desired, we are always willing to work with you to come up with a solution to your particular problem.

Receiver:


There are many ANT solutions that provide support for the Proximity Search function. For more information, please refer to the "Proximity Search" application note available here:
http://www.thisisant.com/pages/developer-zone/ant-application-notes
.

Some ANT solutions also provide extended messaging support. Extended messaging can be used on the receiver side to detect other information along with the transmitted data, such as the channel ID of the transmitting device and the received signal strength indication of the transmitting device.

For your application, I would pay special attention to RSSI extended messaging. Currently, we have this documented in the ANT Message Protocol and Usage document (http://www.thisisant.com/pages/developer-zone/ant-protocol-and-usage) in section 7. We are currently working on an application note for RSSI extended messaging that we will have released by the end of October.

If you have any questions about Proximity Search or RSSI extended messaging, or if you require more information on RSSI extended messaging than is currently provided in the Protocol document, I would be more than happy to help.

If RSSI seems like the solution for you, I will also ping you when the document is up on the website.

Best Regards,

Kassandra Rizopoulos      

Thank you. We are ordering the development kit today. It appears Ant will be a nearly ideal solution for us. I will read up on RSSI and let you know if I have any more questions.

By the way, totally off topic but the "preview" button on this forum does not work at all for me. Does nothing in my browser. Chrome running on 64 bit Windows 7.

David