Messages posted by: jeremyvnc

I would like to know this as well if anyone knows.

I'm at a loss then about the LED. Have you tried applying 3.3V to the LED itself to see if it lights up? Maybe it is burned out. Have you tried communicating with the chip using the RF69 library examples?

Sorry, the mini-wireless board has led on D9, not D13 like a typical arduino. Change the blink example to led=9 and you should see it blink after doing the ISP programming.

If the LED doesn't blink and it is set to 13, then you have a problem. What profile did you use to program the board with ISP? What are the fuse settings. When using ISP in arduino, AVRDude will write your fuse bits every time you flash.

Thanks for the link to the calculator. In my testing with the RFM69HCW modules, I didn't see a difference between the 1/4, 1/2, and full wave antenna lengths. They all seemed to drop off at the same distance and it didn't really hurt or change the close range reliability. I do know that without any antenna, the range is severely limited and easily blocked by a person standing in the LOS.

When I program mine, I just soldered a 6 pin male header to the miniwireless and plugged in the FTDI board making sure to line up the GND pins. No resistor needed. Can you post a picture of your setup or give a link where you got your FTDI board. Mine is from Sparkfun. This one would work: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9873?gclid=CKb_rr688sgCFYQ7aQod8SkJFQ

I've got a list of wireless products that we have been building for the past few years based around the Digi 2.4GHz XBee Series 1 Pro Radios (point to point using API mode 2). For the most part we have good reception from them but in some cases, you can be standing three feet from the device and get no communication. We have a small packet protocol using within the XBee api payload of less than 50 bytes. Now we are looking for a different source of radios that will improve our close range reliability and hopefully extend our range overall.

I have purchased a few RFM69HCW radios for their long range, high power in 433MHz and am seeing a small improvement in most trials in overall range and definitely close range communication. They do seem a bit slower in per packet communication but that could be just the simple program I've worked up to test the two types of radios side by side in our product. I have a few questions though: As a new design, it is reasonable to assume that the 69 Series radios will be around for some time or should we choose to go to another newer radio series? Also, my attention was peaked by the power hungry but longer range(?) RFM23BPS radio. Has anyone done any range testing both close and far to see the reliability of these radios? From my reading, it sounds like this radio has been the choice to use in long range drone telemetry and that the only way to achieve the boasted 30dB gain is to power the device with 5.5V.

My thought was that our devices would be normally powered by the 20dB radio (69HCW or similar) then have an upgrade-able range module using the RFM23BPS to further boost range in heavy traffic areas or to get that extra long range. So, my last question, does anyone know if the RFM23BPS can talk to the RFM69HCW both at 433MHz or what 20dB radio it is compatible with?

Please chime in with your opinions on this.

Thanks,
Jeremy

The miniwireless boards have the arduino bootloader on them (not sure which, might be uniboot) so you just need to use your FTDI board and use one of the built-in profiles for a 16MHz board. The boards I have are powered at 3.3V (69HCW variant) at 16MHz which is actually "overclocking" the ATMega328p.

The profile I used successfully was "Arduino Pro Mini (Atmega328, 5V, 16MHz)." The voltage doesn't matter in the selection on this one as it isn't setting fuses through bootloader, only atmega chip and frequency.

Hope this helps.