What if you could stand up a working indoor positioning demo before your coffee gets cold? That is the pitch behind Makerfabs' MaTouch ESP32-S3 MaUWB, a board that promises a live Ultra-Wideband ranging result on-screen in about three minutes.
What the board actually does
Indoor positioning is the awkward gap in most navigation projects. GPS falls apart the moment you walk through a doorway, so tracking a robot or a tagged asset inside a lab or classroom needs a different trick. Ultra-Wideband fills that gap. It is a low-power, short-range radio that measures time-of-flight and time-difference-of-arrival between devices, the same method Apple's AirTag and Samsung's SmartTag+ use to point you at your keys. Makerfabs bundles the radio, an ESP32-S3, and a touchscreen onto one board so the ranging numbers show up directly on the display instead of scrolling past in a serial monitor.
How does the hardware add up?
The brain is an Espressif ESP32-S3 with 8MB of PSRAM and 16MB of flash, wired to Makerfabs' in-house MaUWB module. That radio is IEEE 802.15.4-2011 compliant and runs on Channel 5 at 6489.6MHz. On the front sits a 3.95-inch capacitive touchscreen at 480x320 resolution, driven over SPI through an ST7796 controller. The setup scales to 8 anchors and 64 tags, which is enough to cover a full classroom or a small warehouse aisle. You also get native USB plus a USB-UART debug port through a CH340K chip, a microSD slot, USB-C charging for an optional LiPo battery, and an expansion header that breaks out the unused GPIO pins for your own sensors.
Try it yourself
At $59.80 (roughly PHP 3,400) the MaTouch is not a throwaway part, but the schematics, board files, and a sample positioning app are all published to the Makerfabs GitHub, so you can read the code before you buy. For a thesis on indoor robot navigation or a classroom demo on time-of-flight math, that reference project is the real head start. Wire up one board as an anchor, a second as a tag, and watch the distance update on-screen, then swap in your own logic on the free GPIO. Full teardown and specs are on the original writeup at Hackster.io.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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