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 480×320 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the MaTouch board measure indoor position without GPS?
It uses an Ultra-Wideband radio that calculates time-of-flight and time-difference-of-arrival between an anchor and a tag. Because UWB is short-range and works indoors where GPS signals fail, it can locate a device in 3D space accurately enough for room-scale tracking.
What does the MaTouch ESP32-S3 MaUWB cost and what comes with it?
The board is $59.80 (about PHP 3,400) and integrates an ESP32-S3 with 8MB PSRAM and 16MB flash, a 3.95-inch 480×320 touchscreen, the MaUWB radio, USB-C charging, and a microSD slot. Schematics, board files, and a sample positioning app are on the Makerfabs GitHub.
What will I learn if I build this?
You will pick up how Ultra-Wideband ranging works in practice, how to read time-of-flight data on an ESP32-S3, and how to drive an SPI touchscreen with the ST7796 controller. It is a solid on-ramp to embedded positioning for a thesis or robotics project, plus real practice reading GPIO and wiring anchors to tags.
