The place where random ideas get written down and lost in time.
2020-07-22 - Embedded Arduino-likes and exchanging data
Category DEVInteresting comment here in an Adafruit guide:
“If you're new to wireless communication and want to use BLE to make a group of microcontrollers talk to each other, we recommend you STOP RIGHT NOW AND GO LOOK AT THE PACKET RADIO FEATHERS.”
What they call “Packet Radio Boards”, namely RFM69 modules or RFM95 Lora (19 kpbs at 100m / 500m line of sight respectively) in either 433 MHz or 900 MHz.
“Feather” is the Adafruit name for an ATmega32u4 that has an RFM69 module directly on it. The RFM module uses the 3 SPI pins (SCK/MOSI/MISO).
The antenna for the US 915 MHz is simply a 3 inch long wire.
Guides:
- Adafruit RFM69HCW and RFM9X LoRa Packet Radio Breakouts.
- Using the RFM69 Radio with “RadioHead RFM69 library” example. That library has a simple send/receive for a binary blob buffer.
(Future self comment: this, of course, is a bit Adafruit selling their own stuff… Although there’s merit in the suggestion above especially for people who feel stuck on Arduino for some reason, yet there’s an alternative to consider here: ESP-NOW on any ESP32).