Adafruit Feather 32u4 RFM96 LoRa Radio – 433MHz

This is the Adafruit Feather 32u4 LoRa Radio (RFM9x). We call these RadioFruits, our take on an microcontroller with a "Long Range (LoRa)" packet radio transceiver with built in USB and battery charging. Its an Adafruit Feather 32u4 with a 433 radio module cooked in! Great for making wireless networks that can go further than 2.4GHz 802.15.4 and similar, are more flexible than Bluetooth LE and without the high power requirements of WiFi.

Feather is the new development board from Adafruit, and like its namesake it is thin, light, and lets you fly! We designed Feather to be a new standard for portable microcontroller cores.

This is the 433 MHz radio version. We also sell a 868/915 MHz version of the same radio chipset! And if you don’t need LoRa radio, we have plain 433MHz packet radios as well

At the Feather 32u4’s heart is at ATmega32u4 clocked at 8 MHz and at 3.3V logic, a chip setup we’ve had tons of experience with as it’s the same as the Flora. This chip has 32K of flash and 2K of RAM, with built in USB so not only does it have a USB-to-Serial program & debug capability built in with no need for an FTDI-like chip, it can also act like a mouse, keyboard, USB MIDI device, etc.

To make it easy to use for portable projects, we added a connector for any of our 3.7V Lithium polymer batteries and built in battery charging. You don’t need a battery, it will run just fine straight from the micro USB connector. But, if you do have a battery, you can take it on the go, then plug in the USB to recharge. The Feather will automatically switch over to USB power when its available. We also tied the battery thru a divider to an analog pin, so you can measure and monitor the battery voltage to detect when you need a recharge.

Here’s some handy specs! Like all Feather 32u4’s you get:

Measures 2.0" x 0.9" x 0.28" (51mm x 23mm x 8mm) without headers soldered in

Light as a (large?) feather – 5.5 grams

ATmega32u4 @ 8MHz with 3.3V logic/power

3.3V regulator with 500mA peak current output

USB native support, comes with USB bootloader and serial port debugging

You also get tons of pins – 20 GPIO pins

Hardware Serial, hardware I2C, hardware SPI support

7 x PWM pins

10 x analog inputs

Built in 100mA lipoly charger with charging status indicator LED

Pin #13 red LED for general purpose blinking

Power/enable pin

4 mounting holes

Reset button

This Feather 32u4 LoRa Radio uses the extra space left over to add an RFM9x LoRa 433 MHz radio module. These radios are not good for transmitting audio or video, but they do work quite well for small data packet transmission when you need more range than 2.4 GHz (BT, BLE, WiFi, ZigBee).

SX1276 LoRa® based module with SPI interface

Packet radio with ready-to-go Arduino libraries

Uses the amateur or license-free ISM band: ITU "Europe" license-free ISM or ITU "American" amateur (with amateur band limitations)

+5 to +20 dBm up to 100 mW Power Output Capabili