Ultra-Wide Band: A Transformational Technology for the Internet of Things • Hacker News Board

Re: Ultra-Wide Band: A Transformational Technology for the Internet of Things

#11

Post by victorbjorklund » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

api wrote: post #8

victorbjorklund wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need internet for this. You can just use Home Assistant with all data locally.

You need the cloud for vendor lock in and spying. That being said, most users can’t set up home assistant. But the reason for that is that HA lacks the funding to do the insane amount of work required to offer a near zero touch setup process, and other vendors have no incentive to play ball with them much either. (Computers are very hard to use and making them easy is a giant tar pit of grueling work.) Going full cir…

I have had zero problems connecting pretty much all hardware to Home Assistant. But yea, if you have zero technical skills it is hard to self-host anything.

Re: Ultra-Wide Band: A Transformational Technology for the Internet of Things

#12

Post by amluto » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #9

djoldman wrote: post #5

These seem like great examples of features with minuscule benefits on average: > Imagine: > Your thermostat adjusting the temperature automatically as you enter the room. > Your TV resuming your favorite show that you were watching yesterday as you sit on the couch > Your car door automatically opening when approach the vehicle and adjusting its seat position and temperature based on your preferences The vast majorit…

It’s minor but can improve user experience if implemented well. I know several people who scoffed at the “need” for automation in car locking and unlocking. It just feels like the obvious way now. Another use case would be access control in buildings. There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this. Another scenario is getting…

> There are millions of insecure iClass type cards securing doors and elevators that would be easily and securely replaced by tech like this.

Those cards could be replaced, even more easily, with NFC cards with better security properties. ISO 14443-3A is a perfectly adequate protocol and has the nifty added benefit of not needing batteries in the card.

Even secure ranging is doable at NFC frequencies — all it takes is a vendor who is willing to do the work as well as customers who will demand it. I think I even saw papers about this years ago: the reader and the card can securely negotiate a request that the door will send and the card will reply to, and then the door sends the request and the card validates the request (against precomputed data) and replies. It’s okay if there’s delay due to the limited computational power of the card as long as the card knows what the delay is and can report the delay to the reader. This will give ranging precise to a bit time or better, which is nowhere near the 10cm precision that UWB offers but is a whole lot better than anything anyone has actually deployed in an iClass-style device.

But customers aren’t even demanding cards that are immune to trivial UID cloning.

Re: Ultra-Wide Band: A Transformational Technology for the Internet of Things

#13

Post by jauntywundrkind » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

I do love the idea of a good medium bandwidth proximity based protocol that has very low latency. 802.15.4z goes 2.4Mb/s but proprietary UWB in the same domain goes up to 64Mb/s which becomes more interesting.

10cm is pretty good positional accuracy too, albeit it feels perhaps short of what we'd need for great pose tracking. To me it's fun to consider what a smart home that can better project it's own digital twin. Also useful data for AR & spatial computing.

For anyone else following Mouser new product feel, I think the arrival of Qorvo'a newest Qorvo QM35825 RF SoC was a very fun arrival to see. https://www.mouser.com/new/qorvo/qorvo-qm35825-uwb-low-power...

I do wish that high bandwidth UWB was doing better. I really like the idea of a wireless dock, being able to plug in USB devices and get good bandwidth and especially low latency. I'm not super keyed in to what's happening in VR headset space but they seem to be the only folks using high speed UWB at all these days. WiGig / 802.11ad I hope we see you again!

This is wandering really far afield from the topic at hand, but should out to FluxPosez which is trying to build short range pose trackers using magnetic sensing. Seems really neat too. https://www.fluxpose.com/