Electronic Cats' BastWAN Dev Board Brings Arduino IDE-Compatible LoRa to the Feather Form Factor
Board design includes 868MHz and 915MHz ISM support, and can be programmed directly from the Arduino IDE over micro-USB.
Mexican electronics specialist Electronic Cats has unveiled a new Arduino-compatible, Feather-layout LoRa wireless development board, the BastWAN, based on Microchip's SAM R34 radio-equipped system-on-chip.
"A year ago we created the CatWAN family, all our electronic cards that have LoRa or LoRaWAN technology," Electronic Cats' Andres Sabas explains. "In the way of creating these devices we have worked with microcontrollers and several variants of the module SX127x from Semtech. But for the last few months we have looked at a chip that launched this year on the market: Microchip's SAM R34, a module which basically contains a SAM L21 microcontroller and radio all in a single package."
"One of the drawbacks of this microcontroller was the encapsulation type, BGA solder balls which for testing could be welded but for larger production would be difficult without the necessary soldering equipment. While we had this dilemma our friends RAK Wireless announced the module RAK4260."
The RAK4260 module takes Microchip's SAM R34 and places it on a castellated module, far better suited to small-scale manufacturing than the BGA of Microchip's SoC on its own. "Now we had everything we needed to work comfortably and migrate this interesting microcontroller to the Arduino IDE," Sabas notes. "For this we created a development board: The 'BastWAN.'"
The BastWAN board features a Microchip SAM R34 capable of operating in the 868MHz and 915MHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) spectra, an Arm Cortex-M0 low-power microcontroller, SPI flash memory — which, the company claims, will soon allow the board to support CircuitPython - along with an ATTEC608A security chip for LoRa operation. The Feather-format board also includes a user-addressable LED, a lithium-polymer battery charging circuit, uFL and SMA antenna connectors, and a micro-USB port for data and programming.
Electronic Cats has also been working on adding support for the SAM R34 to the Arduino IDE, releasing a core definition that enables both the microcontroller and radio to be programmed directly from the IDE. The company has also ported the UF2 bootloader, which will support its efforts to bring CircuitPython and MakeCode to the device.
More information on the BastWAN board, which will be up for sale soon, can be found on the Electronic Cats website; the Arduino board support files, meanwhile, can be found on the company's GitHub repository.