Hi,
Texas Instruments has always committed to provide the best products and tools to its customers and the BOOSTXL-AOA has been one of these tools. Originally released in 2018, this design has enabled engineers to evaluate Angle of Arrival (AoA) based on Bluetooth® Low Energy. This design has shown value in controlled environments (i.e. in anechoic chambers). However, in a non-controlled environment, this design is influenced by multi-path transmissions and unfortunately cannot provide a consistent AoA experience in a real-world use case. As a consequence, TI has discontinued the BOOSTXL-AOA evaluation tool.
This does not affect support for Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding on the CC13x2 and CC26x2 devices. These devices still support Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding both as target and as locator. The SimpleLink Academy labs have been modified in order to showcase how any antenna board can be used to build an AoA locator device.
Over the last few years, we have learned a great amount about AoA and the antenna design. This application report gathers these learnings and can be leveraged to produce an application-specific AoA antenna board. Thank you for your understanding.
Best regards,
