A conference company claims an Auracast first
Plus: Windows 11 splits Bluetooth audio and imec's UWB chip quadruples range
This Week in Bluetooth & UWB |
July 10, 2026 |
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In This Issue
→ Silent conferences go Auracast
→ Windows 11 splits audio via LE → LILYGO's dual new dev boards → imec's UWB chip quadruples range → Buses go tap-free with UWB |
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What I'm Working On
I've been building PowerScope, a power-profiling extension for VS Code (coming soon). Instead of staring at a bare current trace and guessing, it gives you a ranked breakdown of where your power budget goes, and catches the one event that quietly drains a coin cell early (same theme as the brown-out post). The decoder's already bench-verified on real nRF54L15 and nRF54LM20 hardware, and I'm looking for a few early beta testers before it goes public.
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Bluetooth LE
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TTGmice
Congress Australia has launched a silent conference rental service built on Auracast, part of the Bluetooth LE Audio standard, calling itself the first provider to bring the broadcast-audio technology to professional conferences. The system pairs active noise-cancelling headphones with wireless broadcast audio across more than 10 simultaneous channels, designed for speech clarity rather than the entertainment use cases Auracast is best known for.
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Guiding Tech
Windows 11's Shared Audio feature lets a PC broadcast one audio stream to two Bluetooth devices simultaneously, splitting output at the system level so both devices hear the same sound without cables or third-party apps. Microsoft began previewing it in October 2025 and has since expanded it to the 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1 updates. Because it depends on Bluetooth LE Audio broadcast support in both hardware and drivers, it's currently limited to specific Copilot+ PCs.
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LinuxGizmos
LILYGO listed two new boards: the T-Display C5, built around the ESP32-C5 with dual-band Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth Low Energy 5, a color LCD, 16MB flash and 8MB PSRAM; and the T-Echo Card, a rugged IP66 LoRa device using Nordic's nRF52840 (1MB flash, 256KB RAM) for Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, Zigbee, ANT, NFC and 802.15.4, paired with an SX1262 LoRa transceiver, GNSS, and solar charging.
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CNX Software
Waveshare's ESP32-C5-Touch-LCD-2.8 devkit pairs a 2.8-inch capacitive touchscreen (320×480, IPS) with dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE on a single-core RISC-V ESP32-C5 running at 240 MHz. It ships with 384KB SRAM, 8MB PSRAM, 32MB flash, a built-in mic and speaker interface, a temperature/humidity sensor, a 6-axis motion sensor, and a 2-pin LiPo charging header.
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IoT Insider
At London's Hardware Pioneers Max show, Nordic Semiconductor detailed how its nRF54 series is reshaping the balance between power consumption and on-device intelligence for battery-constrained hardware. The nRF54LM20B brings on-device AI capability to ultra-low-power products, letting devices keep data on-device rather than round-tripping to the cloud, cutting both latency and privacy exposure while running on smaller batteries with longer lifetime.
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TipRanks
Hubble Network's tags send Bluetooth Low Energy signals to a terrestrial network of more than 100 million gateways across 170+ countries, with satellites (seven launched via SpaceX so far) filling coverage gaps over oceans and remote terrain. The company frames its coin-cell-powered tags as an alternative to cellular trackers for medical shipments, industrial assets, and lone workers where cellular coverage is unreliable.
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Ultra-Wideband (UWB)
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Dataquest India
At the IEEE MTT-S RF Integrated Circuits Symposium, imec unveiled the first narrowband receiver chip that complies with and validates the narrowband assistance (NBA) mechanism defined in the upcoming IEEE 802.15.4ab UWB standard, supporting a four-fold increase in ranging distance. A novel second-order transimpedance amplifier suppresses strong out-of-band interferers like Wi-Fi early in the signal chain. The design draws under 6mW, achieves a 9dB dynamic-range improvement over state-of-the-art implementations, and tolerates Wi-Fi blockers around -32dBm.
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ACN Newswire
JCB, Resona Holdings, and fare-equipment maker ODAWARA have signed an MOU to develop UWB wireless payments for Japan's buses. Unlike NFC or QR payments, UWB's precise ranging lets riders board and alight without tapping a phone or scanning anything, aimed at easing driver workload amid Japan's bus-industry labor shortage. Technical trials start this fiscal year, with small-scale commercial rollout targeted for FY2027 and full deployment by FY2028.
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IoT Insider
Digital car keys work as small IoT systems: UWB provides cryptographically secure time-of-flight distance measurement to resist relay attacks, Bluetooth Low Energy establishes the initial connection and estimates device position before unlocking, and NFC serves as a fallback. The article argues the real obstacle isn't the technology itself but interoperability, getting competing automakers and phone makers to agree on unified protocols through bodies like the Car Connectivity Consortium.
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CNX Software
Makerfabs' MaUWB for Home Assistant pairs an ESP32-S3 with a Qorvo DW3000 UWB transceiver and a WIZnet W5500 Ethernet controller for Power over Ethernet, running ESPHome firmware for direct Home Assistant integration. It's built for indoor positioning and real-time location tracking of tagged objects, supporting Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 alongside UWB ranging with up to 500 meters of maximum range.
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Electric Vehicles
Apple is preparing Wallet car-key support for two more automakers, Xiaomi and Lucid Motors, both spotted in iOS 27 beta code this week. Wallet's car key feature already lets iPhone and Apple Watch owners lock, unlock, and start compatible vehicles using NFC or UWB, supporting passive entry, proximity-based access, and remote control, though exact capabilities vary by manufacturer. The feature is expected to arrive when iOS 27 ships in September.
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P.S. Edge AI creeping into ultra-low-power chips like Nordic's nRF54LM20B feels like the next real shift for battery-powered devices. If you're already experimenting with on-device inference in your own designs, I'd love to hear about it.
— Mohammad Afaneh
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