Electronic Cats' BastWAN LoRa Feather-Format Dev Board Launches with a RAK4260 Module at Its Heart
First unveiled a year ago, the BastCAT is now up for sale at $31.39 a unit — all features and specifications intact.
Electronic Cats' Feather-format, Arduino-compatible LoRa dev board, the BastWAN, is now available to buy — a year after the company first unveiled the design.
Mexican electronics specialist Electronic Cats first showed off the BastWAN design, which aimed to succeed from the company's CatWAN family, a year ago, promising that the RAKwireless RAK4260-powered development board would be up for sale imminently. It's taken a little longer than anticipated, but it's now ready for purchase.
"BastWAN is a Feather form factor board with the ultra-low-power, high-performance RAK4260 module at its core," Electronic Cats' Andres Sabas explains. "It is powered by the Microchip R34 LoRa system-in-package (SiP) incorporating a 48MHz SAML21 32-bit microcontroller. It also comes with native USB functionality and a LoRa transceiver."
The specifications of the board are unchanged from those shared last year: The RAK4260 includes radio hardware capable of operating in the 868MHz and 915MHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) spectra, a 48MHz Arm Cortex-M0 low-power microcontroller, 256kB SPI flash memory and 32kB of RAM, and an ATECC608A security chip.
The edges of the board include 20 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins with six 12-bit analog inputs and a single 10-bit analog output, there's a built-in 100mA LiPo battery charger with indicator LED, a user-addressable red LED, a reset pin and button, and mounting holes at the corners.
"For easy software development, the Arduino environment is fully supported including a LoRa/LoRaWAN compatible stack," Sabas notes. "The board comes preloaded with the UF2 bootloader and appears as a virtual disk drive, reprogramming is as simple as dragging and dropping the firmware file - no special tools required. Being BOSSA compatible this bootloader also can be used directly within the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE), MakeCode, and many others."
The board is currently up on Electronic Cats' Tindie store, priced at $31.39.