Adafruit's "RadioFruit" Feather RP2040 RFM95 Offers a Low-Cost, Low-Power LoRa Radio Project Base
Configurable to 868MHz or 915MHz operation, this new Feather board is everything you need for long-range low-power communication projects.
Adafruit has officially launched its latest entry in the Feather family of breadboard-friendly development boards, and this one pairs Raspberry Pi's popular dual-core RP2040 microcontroller with an RFM95 LoRa radio module for a compact Internet of Things (IoT) project base.
"We call these RadioFruits, our take on a microcontroller with a 'Long Range (LoRa)' packet radio transceiver with built-in USB and battery charging," the company says of its newest hardware design. "It's an Adafruit Feather RP2040 with a 900MHz radio module cooked in! Great for making wireless networks that are more flexible than Bluetooth LE and without the high power requirements of Wi-Fi."
The core specifications of the new board will be familiar to anyone who's seen the company's earlier Feather RP2040: a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at 133MHz and with 264kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM) plus a8MB of external SPI flash storage, a lithium-polymer battery charging circuit, one each of a single-color and RGB LEDs, a StemmaQT connector for solder-free expansion, and a USB Type-C connector for data and power.
Where the standard Adafruit Feather RP2040 lacks wireless connectivity, though, this new variant includes a 900MHz RFM95 module based on a Semtech SX1276 transceiver — configurable for LoRa- and LoRaWAN-standard radio communication on either the 868MHz or 915MHz spectrums, depending on which is locally appropriate vis-a-vis radio licensing laws.
"These radios are not good for transmitting audio or video," Adafruit admits, "but they do work quite well for small data packet transmission when you need more range than 2.4GHz (BT [Bluetooth], BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy], Wi-Fi, ZigBee)."
The new board is now available to order on the Adafruit website for $29.95, including male pin headers should you want to solder them into place on the board.