Hi all! I’m a firmware developer with little knowledge in analog electronics… I deal with firmware for IOT projects all the time.
I had to make a breakout board with an off the shelf RF module with self contained PCB antenna. Now I’m intrigued in the hardware side. I’m inclined to design them from scratch myself. (Obviously ignoring the EMI and FCC certifications for the time being).
What concepts should I be familiar with to achieve this? Starting on I figured to brush up on circuit theory and signals. Where do I go from here? What materials would you recommend? Hopefully I don’t need to get into hardcore RF theory to design these PCBs (I know kicad already has these premade antenna blocks).
Thank you.
My stuff is all in the middle of nowhere for making my watering bowls talk to the pumps or open cattle gates over Lora, and I’ve moved back to prebuilt E32 modules because they’re way less expensive than all that shit used to be.
We don’t spend money on Grandma, she’ll outlive us all.
It might be worth it for you to get a ham radio license. If the low power modules work for what you need, that is just fine. For the distances you are talking about with cattle fields, being able to legally transmit at over 1000 watts could have perks. (I jest, but having a little more power, in the 1 to 2 watt range, might be practical.)
At a minimum, a portable ham radio might be a good safety tool depending on the size of the ranch. It would be hella more reliable than CB as well.
Yah, I’ve had my license since I was young, I come from a long line of nerds. So I use 1W units on the 433 band. And we use VHF around the farm since we can be 15 km from cell range.
Same here. Nerd blood runs deep in families.
(When the power brick blew out for my Atari, my dad simply cut open a random spare and re-wound the transformer to match the correct voltage. It was the neatest thing I had ever seen at that age.)
We never bought a TV because Dad would pick them up at the dump and fix them, doing some sort of magic with the CRTs.
And my grandpa hand-built one of the first radios in the area, and people would come over to listen to radio programs. When phones came to our area, he was running lines on the barbwire fences over to neighbors to use it until the phone coop could get out to hook them up a couple years later.
They were nerds before it was cool. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
wow didnt’ know that Ebyte modules were that popular! I’ve come across them in site like lcsc and Ali… Making use of them is what my current skill level allows. some of the varieties are relatively expensive though…
I’ve been blow away how inexpensive they’ve become. I’m getting 1W 433 modules for like $15 now, I think I got them off amazon last time. They’re not on a public band or power rating, at least for NA, but I have a ham license so in my area I’m OK, and besides, nobody else is going to notice.
At one time I was using the Heltec Lora V2 modules but they’re way more expensive for low power and I became convinced they had no ESD hardening because if I looked at them sideways they’d crater.
I made a couple of my own shit designs with integrated antennas and they worked, but it’s not my forte. I made them because getting 433 was hard at the time, and I was convinced I needed the lower freq to get better LOS through trees.
haha I guess cheap is relative :) I was considering parts at 4 to 5$ range. But i’m talking about low power ble/zigbee etc…
Well, with some of my telemetry I’m trying to punch 10 klicks so there’s no kill like overkill. The little SX1278s are inexpensive and they’re legal power, and there’s plenty of examples out there for them.
I kinda like the UART design on the e32s though, but it was a struggle getting the library that uses them to work, and there’s little tricks like having to initialize the serial independent of his constructors, you read the code and it supposedly opens the serial, but it doesn’t work if you don’t do it beforehand, at least with the modules I was using.