Thursday, March 31, 2016

LoRa Products Coming from Adafruit!

Over the past couple of months I've been working on bringing LoRa support to the Adafruit Feather line of microcontroller boards. I designed a small Development Breakout FeatherWing for the HopeRF RFM95/96(W) module, as well as the LoRa FeatherWing IOX that uses an I/O expander to drive the numerous pins of the RFM module over I2C.

My boards are of course non-official FeatherWings that can be added as daughterboards to Feathers (similar to shields for Arduinos). Well, it looks like Adafruit has also been working on LoRa products! On a recent episode of their weekly Ask An Engineer web show, Ladyada gave a sneak peak of some boards she has in the works. One looks to be a Feather board with an RFM95W module directly on it. Another board is a breakout for the RFM module.

Prototype of a new "Top Secret" LoRa Feather.

Breakout board for the RFM modules (yellow PCB) along with a tester and a live demo.

This is great news for the LoRa community. As official products, they will be sold in the store and no doubt come with excellent code support and tutorials. Additionally, it will help to integrate LoRa Feathers with other FeatherWings and eliminate the need for a daughterboard just for the module itself.

There was no ETA given on the LoRa products, but with functional prototypes and testers already completed, we shouldn't have to wait long.

Thanks for reading!

- Dan W.

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