Penguino's Latest STM32WL Feather Is a GPIO-Rich LoRa Dev Board
The board is based on Move Solutions' MAMWLE SoM, which combines an STMicroelectronics STM32WL and Semtech SX1262.
Electronics maker Orkhan Amiraslan loves designing open source boards, sharing them, and selling products based on them in the MakerTronika Labs Tindie Store. Amiraslan's latest offering is the Penguino STM32WL MAMWLE-C1 LoRa dev board. It contains an SoM with a radio that fits on an Adafruit Feather-compatible form factor.
The main module on this Penguino is the MAMWLE-C1 from Move Solutions. It combines an STM32WL microprocessor with a Semtech SX1262 sub-GHz radio into a 15 x 16 millimeter board with a battery charging circuit. A USB-C connector both powers the board and connects to a dedicated USB-to-Serial interface chip.
STMicroelectronics' STM32WL's core is an Arm Cortex-M4 running at 32 MHz with 128 kilobytes of Flash memory and 64 kilobytes of SRAM. STMicro says the focus of this microcontroller is low-power operation.
While the Semtech SX1262 long-range transceiver is usable for many sub-GHz applications, the two most well-known are LoRa and LoRaWAN. It also supports general-purpose modulations like (G)FSK and BSPK. The transmitter uses either a low or high power path with output powers of +14 dBm and +22 dBm, respectively.
"Unlike the official NUCLEO-WL55JC dev board, this one is purpose designed to be low-power." — Penguino MAMWLE-C1 product page
Amiraslan differentiates Penguino MAMWLE-C1 and its STM32WL from STMicro's Uno-form factor NUCLEO with power, size, and flexibility. As quoted above, this more compact feather-compatible board focuses on low power.
Penguino breaks out 20 of the MAMWLE module's 37 general-purpose IO pins to the feather pinouts. An additional 10 GPIOs are available as surface mount test points on the Penguino's PCB. The GPIOs share functions with serial and programming. Various interfaces like SPI, I2C, and UART (serial and parallel) are available. For programming and debug, the module supports both JTAG and SWDIO.
For KiCad design files, gerbers, and an example STM32Cube project, check out this GitHub repository. Alternatively, you can buy a Penguino STM32WL MAMWLE-C1 on Tindie. You may also want to check out other boards from the MakerTronika store. Several variations of the Penguino are available, including another feather form factor based on the Seeed Studio LoRa-E5 module.