Particle RF Gateway and display

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Hi there,

I just created a simple RF gateway board some months ago and today I took some time to wrote an article. The PCB Shield is very simple but provide some place for RF modules and different kind of TFT/OLED.

  • Socket to plug a Spark Core or Particle Photon
  • Pins to connect I2C or SPI OLED 128x64
  • Pins to connect 2.2" or 1.8" TFT LCD
  • RFM69 or RFM12B on board module
  • Lipo Battery connector for testing and move the Gateway (no charger on board)
  • 3V3 On board regulator for harvesting devices if any to avoid pumping from Particle Regulator
  • Data connection for any cheap ebay ASK RX receiver
  • FTDI connection for those who want to debug serial or send data over real serial
  • 2 x grove I2C connector to connect other I2C devices

You’ll find any usefull information on my blog article and all files on my github (schematics, pictures and eagle cad files)

Hope some of Particle’s fan will find it usefull :smile:

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@Charly, nicely done and thank you for sharing! :clap:

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thanks, will be useful for testing u8glib :wink:

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Hi ,

I am just now testing your board with a Photon and a RFM69HW module connected to a Moteino.
I use the Spark supported RFM69 library on Photon and the original Felix library on Moteino.

Board works fine :smile: although I have noted one bothering issue so far .

RSSI readings on Photon side are unstable , about 1 of five in a row shows e.g -87 insted of the correct -52.
I then exchange the Photon board to a Moteino and get no faulthy RSSI readings anymore.

Any idea what might be the reason?
Is the RadioHead library different on this matter?

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@msens
Thanks for using it, great it works for you.

That’s a good point, I even thought about this one but saw one day that Felix had tried the best to do RSSI reading so I’m more confident with his library.

Which one you used in the Spark ? if it’s the one on particle web site it should the one I ported from Felix’s code (so with RSSI reading same as Felix), but not sure so would you provide me the RFM code you used from Spark (link is okay)

Charles

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@Charly

I am using the RFM69 library which is supplied inside Spark Web IDE.
First code line in RFM69.cpp says # if defined(SPARK) and next #include application.h

BUT there are no notes in the headercomment that code was modified by you or somone else. Also no dating from Felix .
In general I find that people often tend to leave out dating and short comments in open source which obviously makes things more difficult than needed. Like now… :smile:

Klas

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@Charly Hey do you know if your library would work with the Photon & the LoRa RFM95W radios?