Well, in spite of never having had a “real” tag detected by our CTT dongles, I was going to attempt to build replacements for our original two - that have died.
So I have been attempting to order the Adafruit Feather 3077 boards. However, Adafruit shows them as out of stock and no estimate for availability. They are also out-of-stock with Mouser, Digikey and PiShop. So I guess our SensorGnome won’t be listening for 434 Mhz tags anytime soon…
I recently got Adafruit Feather M0 RFM96 LoRa Radio - 433MHz [RadioFruit] : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits with hopes that will work. I loaded up a prebuilt image with what appears to be success. Hoping to test it tomorrow.
Has anyone reached out to adafruit to see if they plan to restock? If not, I wonder if they be willing to share the pcb files so that we can have them printed somewhere?
Seems like a possible option. If I remember correctly LoRa is just a variation on the packet radio protocols.
Did you get a chance to test it out?
Yes! It worked great. I was able to use the board to simulate both tag types (as test tags), and observed them locally, at CTT, and at Motus.
I’ll have to build one of those too. I was hoping you had used the 3179 version of the Adafruit feather to make a dongle for receiving the CTT tags. I guess I’ll have to order one of those 3179 feathers and try flashing it with the CTT dongle firmware. If that doesn’t work then I’ll use it for a transmitter.
For what it’s worth, there will soon be a commercial option again for 434 MHz dongles for SensorGnomes. I’m not sure exactly when or what the pricing will be (certainly more $$ than the Feather method, but much simpler) but that should be happening in the next few months.
What did you use to flash them an what firmware was used?
I followed the below.. it worked great, and I didn’t have any complications flashing over USB as described.
Just to clarify, @mtc’s post is about using the feather essentially as a test tag, emitting a dedicated test tag code.
I think that @Ken_R and perhaps @user947 are referring to using the feather to detect CTT tags on a SensorGnome. Instructions for doing that are here: CTT Motus dongles | SensorGnome User Guide.
There do appear to be other sources online that still have them. Just not at Adafruit’s own site.
Unfortunately, the instructions for the CTT Motus dongles are intended for the Feather 32u4 boards (AVR), which are no longer in production. The Feather M0 LoRa boards use a different architecture (ARM) and do not support the Motus firmware .hex file.
I am currently trying to find a solution that would allow the Feather M0 LoRa boards to be used as replacements for the Feather 32u4 boards as dongles.
JSRS, is there any further news on these commercial options you mention?