David’s email about DecaWave.

April 16

30 dev kits ready for shipment: http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en/rf-if-and-rfid/rf-evaluation-and-development-kits-boards/3539644?k=decawave. Only $606.67.

April 18

Two EVK1000 have sold sometime in the last two days. Now only 28 available

April 28

Today there are 18 EVK1000 available and the price has dropped slightly to $590.91. The sales rate is about one per day.

The DWM1000 is now listed at Digikey for $31.84 each. There’s a product brief. There’s no stock yet.
There are 3242 DW1000 in stock today. 3482 were in stock on 4/10/14. The sales rate has increased from 6.1 per day from March 12 – April 10 to 20 per day since .April 10.
I feel the urge to buy a Dev kit.

7 thoughts on “DecaWave EVK1000

  1. I needed a PERT chart to explain the previous. Each of those four steps above has a substantial software component, so it will probably overlap with the next hardware phase.

    I'm thinking that the first few steps would go like this. What do you think?

    1. BLE tool-chain setup, familiarization and simple BLE proximity prototype
    2. DW tool-chain setup, familiarization and simple ranging prototype
    3. DEWBLY 0.1 rats nest prototype with BLE waking up DW from deep sleep
    4. DEWBLY 0.2 big battery powered portable version of 0.1 (2/3 reps)
    5. DEWBLY 0.3 small battery + peripherals
    6. DEWBLY 0.4 form-factor revision

    Software for each of the first three steps will at least a month each which gives a good three months to get the first DEWBLY board done.

    We could need a 0.10 … 0.12 to get the rat's nest PSU/coulombe counter working, do some tests and have a rethink in the light of what we learn. There's two more months minimum.

    So once the hardware department has figured out how to do coulombe counter for the rat's nest there will be quite a long period before 0.2 will be needed.

    I can't see further than that.

  2. Not sure I understand your second para.

    I was thinking that we would initially try out a DecaWave system – somehow TBD. We want to know if it will give better-then-Nanotron range results indoors. That means possibly writing code to make it range, and adding a coulomb counter to see how much juice it sucks.

    If that works then we can wire it to a BLE EVAL board and see if the basic concept (using a BLE to wake up and sync two DV rangers) has any credibility.

    If it does then we build a hybrid board that we can use for multi-node experiments. It might need a big battery, but it is portable.

    If that works then the next step is to see if we can get the power down to coin-cell levels.

  3. Yes it does seem like a big chunk of change, but it's relative. If we have an EVK then we have an excuse to pester DecaWave mercilessly with questions. We also have a benchmark against which to test the DKW1000 modules (it has a chip antenna). At least the price is less than half what it was not that long ago: 800 Euro each board. The EVK1000 has two, so it's $295 per board.

    Perhaps the first board we make ourselves should be a DM1000 with the BLE of our choice. It could interface with the TI, Nordic or ST Eval boards, perhaps in addition to having the layout for the chip-down BLE we think we are most likely to use. There would be minimal software to be written. Would you put any MEMS on the board, maybe at least an accelerometer? Footprints are free, basically; we could put the Invensense IMU on the board, and why not a barometer too?

    ST is working on a hygrometer.

  4. Well at least people are buying them. Perhaps they are all making products. It seems important to get a DW devkit if only to see how badly it performs indoors and against the body. If it's crap then this project is kinda done I guess. Does not $590 seem a helluva lot of money? Not that there's much choice of course.

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