Many of my teardown blog followers suggested that I should do a teardown of JioTag Air also a teardown of Apple AirTag and compare it. So here is a Teardown of JioTag Air, will see when I can do teardown of Apple AirTag in the future.
The JioTag Air is a compact and affordable Bluetooth tracker designed to help users keep track of valuables like keys, wallets, or even pets.
It is compatible with both the Apple Find My network (for iPhone users) and the JioThings app (for Android users).
The device offers features such as real-time location tracking, notifications when items are left behind, and a loud sound alert to help you find your belongings.
It also has a long battery life of up to one year and includes a replaceable battery for convenience.
I purchased it for 1499 INR from Amazon.
JioTag Air comes with a small standard packaging, nothing very fancy.
This device is designed and manufactured in China by Beijing Zizai Technology Co., Ltd
I have no idea why a company like Jio cannot build a device like this by their own or get it done in collaboration with an Indian company to build such a product, that would have also helped build the Indian Ecosystem.
Testing the market with a ready product and once sales pickup, decide to manufacture in India should be a game of small player not for a giant company like JIO.
I am not sure what was the reason behind this, I hope in the future they will take a decision to build more and more devices in India and help Indian ecosystem.
Our company CAPUF Embedded could have helped them build such a device very easily, we have a lot of experience with low power Nordic Semiconductor SoCs.
Hundreds of other much capable companies are there in India.
Anyway, let’s see what’s inside the device, how the construction is, and what the electronics look like.
You will get a foam-packed JioTag Air inside the packaging and one spare CR2032 Maxwell Coin Cell.
Opening the enclosure/cover was very easy. Inside, you see a Coin cell and spring-loaded pogo pins for the Piezo buzzer. Near the Pogo pins, you also see test points for programming and testing in production.
Inside electronics should be pretty straightforward. Let us remove the enclosure further and see it.
You can clearly see on the PCB (U1) Nordic Semiconductor’s NRF52832 which is the main MCU for the device and does all the computation and Bluetooth communication(BLE 5.3) with the Phone.
They claim to have a battery life of 1 year.
On the PCB U4 seems to be IMU, an accelerometer can help detect activity or no activity and based on that control the Bluetooth data transfer. R3, R4 seems to be I2C pull up resistors and C19 looks like a decoupling capacitor.
There is no need of external power supply section as Nordic SoC is capable of running from the Coin cell, so I am not sure what is the use of U3 device, I wasn’t able to find any details about it, will add once I know more about it. Doesn’t look like a UWB device as I don’t see any RF antenna for that.
In the image below you can see the PCB Bluetooth Antenna. K1 is the button to activate the device.
One LED is also provided for indication, you will find it near U3 IC.
Some more images of the PCB are shared below
On the PCB, you can see several test points T1, T2, T3 and so on, these are mainly used in production for testing the PCB.
You can watch this video to understand how to setup the device with your smartphone app
So, that’s all in this teardown, I hope you found it interesting and learned something new. I will see come back with another interesting blog soon.
I am running an Embedded Design House, CAPUF Embedded Pvt. Ltd, located in Bangalore, India. At CAPUF, we help companies build embedded products with our hardware and firmware design services.
We also help in design optimizations for power consumption, cost, mass manufacturing, and performance.