Arduino Unveils the Stella and Portenta UWB Shield Tracking Gadgets, in Partnership with Truesense

Arduino is showing off the fruit of its partnership with Truesense at Embedded World this week, ahead of a pair of impending product launches: the Arduino Stella and Portenta UWB Shield, both featuring ultra-wideband (UWB) technology for high-accuracy real-time positional tracking.

"At this year's Arduino booth, we're turning ideas into reality with groundbreaking solutions for smart industries, automotive prototyping, and next-gen IoT [Internet of Things] applications. We're unveiling two new UWB-powered products, developed with Truesense," the Arduino team says of its Embedded World showing in Nuremberg this week, "to enable next-level precision tracking, seamless connectivity with cloud platforms, and secure data transmission."

Those two products are the Arduino Stella and the Portenta UWB Shield, both products of a partnership with Truesense the companies announced in October last year. The boards make use of Truesense's DCU040 and DCU150 ultra-wideband (UWB) hardware respectively — the former taking the form factor of a compact octagonal PCB with button-cell battery holder and a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 microcontroller and the latter an add-on designed for use with the Arduino Portenta C33 development board.

The Arduino Stella is designed to operate as a client node in a UWB network, providing high-accuracy real-time location tracking when combined with base stations — while the Portenta UWB Shield can work as either a fellow client node or the aforementioned base station. Both can be programmed using the Arduino IDE, with the company promising libraries at launch, a series of tutorials, and ready-to-use code samples.

More information on the new parts is available on the Arduino website, with pricing and availability yet to be announced; the company is also showing off the hardware in live demos at Embedded World this week, Hall 3A Booth 313.