SparkFun Forums

[minime72706]

Are we ever going to see these boards as mentioned in the product page for the RFM12?

I'm seriously dying for them.

[leon_heller]

I've made my own breakout boards for similar units, on a few occasions. It's quite easy.

[minime72706]

I know it would be fairly simple to do (make it myself), but this is a school senior project and I already don't think I have the time I need to complete it.

I was just hoping to get a rise out of sparkfun if other people were interested, which apparently they are not.

I can rig something up if I have to; I'm already using the Jeenode boards, but I just want a breakout board for the radio module by itself for prototyping.

[minime72706]

Though irritated Sparkfun hasn't followed through, i just ended up soldering 30AWG wire to the pads of the RFM12B and plopped it into one of the DIP-14 prototyping areas on the http://evilmadscience.com/tinykitlist/74-atmegaxx8 , it works pretty well. I also put a module onto a small protoboard in the same way. Been able to use the RFM12 library to communicate between modules with these.

[mrbean15]

this parts are difficult to solder, so I started to search for pre-made breakout boards, looks like it doesn't exist.

I need a daughter board to be used with either an arduino pro mini and for a funnel ?

is there anyone interested in making such pcb's for me ?
if price ok , quantity would be : 100
you can contact me on my email : jlcurty at gmail

[minime72706]

I'd likely pay for a few breakout boards myself, but let me present what I did, which is obviously only useful for low quantity prototyping.
I did this twice, and it was much easier to do the second time, that's 30AWG wire from sparkfun.

[robomotic]

Hello, i'm recently playing with wireless sensor networks.
This is my first decent unit working.
An arduino pro mini 328 with an rfm12b on a breakout board with a chip or whip antenna.
The project info is on my blog:
http://lab.robomotic.com/
The library I'm using is the same as the one from the Jeenode labs which is very stable and tested.
The breakout boards are fairly simple and I can sold them chipless or with the rfm12b of your choice.
I'm still testing the pcb antenna to maximize the gain.



Next thing I want to add is a DC-DC boost converter so that you can run the arduino pro and the rfm on a small crc 3.0v battery.
Any feedback much appreciated!

[robomotic]

This is my first successful transmission with the chip antenna:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhspOBQKfkU
Ye!

[buckanear7]

I should have a PCB back this week with the RFM22 on a Arduino shield. Along with a hand held controller board with the RFM22 module. It will also have two RJ45 verticle mount connectors for a telescope control project I am working on.

Hope fully in a week or two I should have some results. I know there is one minor error in the board that will need to be corrected but for right now is extremely easy to correct.

Also both boards will use Lynx Splatch 433MHz antenna.

james

[robomotic]

Very interesting, can you put more info so that we can follow your progress
So you did an arduino shield for the rfm22?

[buckanear7]

Very interesting, can you put more info so that we can follow your progress
So you did an arduino shield for the rfm22?

Yes I did. I have two RJ45 8 pin jacks to interface to two boards that use the Allegro A3967 stepper driver. I can easily drop those and consolidate the digital control lines to one of the digital headers.

My controller board is not exactly an Arduino board. It is the same form factor as the Duemilanove board but the processor has been changed to a MC9S12C128 in a TQFP 48 package. The main reason for the change in the processor is I have a large portion of the routines needed written in HC11 assembly. Migration to the HC12 is a quicker and less painful learning curve I hope. I have a lot more experience with the MC6809 and MC68HC11 processors than the AVRs. The MC9S12 series is very very similar to the MC809 instruction set.

I will post more in the next couple of weeks as I get time to work on the software. I eventually port it over to the UNO. Or even do a UNO with an AVR that has at least 4K of RAM.

james

[RF Solutions]

Hi All,

the company I work for makes an Encoder/Decoder Chipset for use with these modules. They are Called "ALPHA" modules on our website, but they are the standard HOPE ones re-named.

Check out the RF803E-ALPHA and RF803D-ALPHA - they basically give you a simple telemetry link - 3 inputs on the RF803E operating 3 outputs on the RF803D. Currenlty we only have these IC's for the transceiver versions but we might be releasing some others in the future.

Have a look, they might save you some time in develpoment and certianly will making using the RFM12 easier when starting out.

http://www.rfsolutions.co.uk/acatalog/A ... s_dev.html

Finally, If you e-mail our support department, they might be able to send over some smaple PIC code for the transceivers which sets all the registers and gets them talking,

Good luck

Tom

[robomotic]

Yes I saw them.
Are you actually an hoprf license holder?
There could be an improvement in the pinout by exposing the ARSSI output which can be useful rather the using the digital RSSI to compute the received power.

Do you need any breakout board?
I'm looking for a distributor for my pcbs

[redspark]

Hi All,

An interesting development for those of you who are still looking for an RFM12B breakout board. JeeLabs, home of the rf12 library, has just released this board:

http://jeelabs.org/2011/02/02/meet-the-rfm12b-board/

It features a voltage regulator and 3.3V/5V level conversions, to be able to use the RFM12B on 5V systems. If these are left out, the board becomes a simple RFM12B breakout board for 3.3V systems. (In short: it can be used with all Arduino compatible boards.)