Building Budget LoRa Nodes with RFM95

Looking for a budget way to get started with LoRa? This RFM95 breakout board can get you up and running in no time.

If you are within range of a LoRa gateway a node may be all you need to get started experimenting with LoRaWAN and receiving data from your node via the internet. Combining a Hope RFM95 radio module and a micro controller is a very quick and budget way to build a DIY LoRa node.

One challenge with the RFM95 module is that it has a slightly non-standard 2.0 mm pin pitch which can make it difficult to use with electronics breadboards or prototyping board. This breakout PCB solves this by converting the RFM95 to a standard 2.54mm (0.1″) pin pitch and adds a more robust though hole mount for a monopole antenna. It also has the footprint to add an SMA edge connector for really robust antenna connections.

There are stacks of tutorials online about interfacing the RFM95 radio module to micro controllers. One common recipe is to use the RFM95 with an Arduino using the LMIC libraries which have been ported to the Arduino environment. A good tutorial for getting this budget LoRa recipe up and running and connected to The Things Network can be found here.

source https://blog.tindie.com/2020/10/building-budget-lora-nodes-with-rfm95/