Adafruit Feather RP2040 with RFM95 LoRa

The applications demand customizations when it comes to tweaking the use case according to the target requirements. Also, mobility becomes an important factor with the present necessity for usage from varied locations. As a solution, Adafruit tries to incorporate a great degree of portability and customizability with its Feather RP2040 microcontroller board or simply RadioFruit. With RFM95 LoRa Radio – 915MHz  and STEMMA QT,  the board features Long Range (LoRa) packet radio transceiver with the scope for USB and battery charging.

The Radiofruit uses an Adafruit Feather RP2040 chip of 133 MHz and at 3.3V logic. It comes with all the pins this development board originally offers:

• A Lipoly battery support,
• USB C either for power or to access the built-in ROM USB bootloader and serial  port debugging
• Onboard NeoPixel for full-color indication and
• 8MB of FLASH for storing code and files.

On the note of customizability, it comes with many GPIO Pins:

• Four 12-bit ADCs (one more than Pico)
• Two I2C, Two SPI, and two UART peripherals, one labeled for the ‘main’ interface in standard Feather locations
• 16 x PWM outputs – for servos, LEDs, etc.

The Adafruit Feather RP2040 with RFM95 LoRa comes fully assembled with DIO pins connected to the RFM Module. Furthermore, a STEMMA QT connector and a uFL connector enable connecting larger antennas by soldering a simple wire antenna into a solder pad. Thus, it opens up many possibilities for use cases involving radio transmissions and reception.

The microcontroller comes with an 8 MB QSPI FLASH, and 264K RAM is in pertinence with the processor requirements of LoRa and LoRaWAN, which are generally higher. Even though one can power the RadioFruit with USB, its portability can be elevated by connecting Adafruit’s 3.4V Lithium Polymer batteries. Apparently, this feature was added with portable projects specifically in mind.

The Adafruit Feather RP2040 uses 900 MHz radio but can be used at 868 MHz or 915 MHz for transmission or reception. While the radio is not ideal for audio or video transmission, it is suitable for small data packet transmission combined with a wider range of >2.4 GHz (BT, BLE, WiFi, ZigBee).

For more information on Adafruit Feather RP2040, visit the official product page.

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