Adafruit has designed a new variant of the Feather RP2040 board with the “Adafruit Feather RP2040 with RFM95 LoRa Radio” featuring a 900 MHz RFM95 “RadioFruit” module and following the “Adafruit Feather RP2040 with DVI Output Port” that we covered last week.
The board ships with 8 MB of QSPI flash, supports USB-C or LiPo battery power, is offered in the familiar Feather form factor, and the built-in RFM95 module supports 433 MHz, 868MHz, and 915MHz frequencies, selectable by firmware, for global coverage.
Adafruit Feather RP2040 with RFM95 LoRa Radio specifications:
- MCU – Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ microcontroller @ 133 MHz with 264 KB RAM
- Storage – 8MB SPI flash
- RFM95 LoRa wireless module
- Semtech SX127x LoRa transceiver
- Frequency bands – License-free ISM bands: ITU “Europe” @ 433MHz and ITU “Americas” @ 900MHz. (CNXSoft: it looks 900 MHz here means 868 MHz (EU) and 915 MHz (US), plus small variation around those for global coverage)
- Tx Power – +5 to +20 dBm up to 100 mW power output (selectable in software)
- Power consumption – ~300uA during full sleep, ~120mA peak during +20dBm transmit, ~40mA during active radio listening.
- RP2040 interface – SPI
- Antenna – Wire antenna or u.FL antenna connector
- USB – 1x USB Type-C port
- I/Os
- Adafruit Feather compatible headers
- Up to 21x GPIOs
- 2x I2C, 2x SPI, 2x UART
- 4x 12-bit ADC
- 16x PWM
- USB
- 3V, GND, BAT, Enable signals
- STEMMA QT/Qwiic I2C connector
- Adafruit Feather compatible headers
- Misc – BOOT and RESET buttons, user LED, charging status LED, Neopixel RGB LED
- Power Supply
- 5V via USB Type-C port
- 2-pin LiPo battery connector plus LiPo charger circuit with 200mA+ charging current
- 3.3V regulator with 500mA peak current output
- Dimensions – 50.8 x 22.8 x 7mm (Adafruit Feather form factor)
- Weight – 6.3 grams
The new board combines the hardware from the Feather RP2040 and the Adafruit RFM95W LoRa Radio Transceiver Breakout board into a single board. Arduino libraries are provided, and while I could not find a tutorial specific to the “Adafruit Feather RP2040 with RFM95 LoRa Radio” board, the company has a detailed tutorial for the breakout board that shows how to use Arduino and it should be pretty similar for the RP2040 board.
Two options are available for the antenna. You can either solder a wire antenna or connect a u.FL antenna, potentially through a u.FL to SMA adapter. Adafruit achieved a 2km line-of-sight with wire quarter-wave antennas, but SX1272 modules support up to a 30km range with optimization and the right antennas.
It’s not the first Raspberry Pi RP2040 board with an RFM95 LoRa module and the Adafruit Feather form factor we’ve covered either, as Invector Labs’ Challenger RP2040 LoRa board offers almost the same specifications, and it does support CircuitPython, so I’d expect the official Adafruit board to soon support CircuitPython firmware as well, and not just Arduino.
The Adafruit Feather RP2040 with RFM95 LoRa Radio board is available now for $29.95 without an antenna, but the spring antenna only adds 95 cents.
Via Hackster.io
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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