Feather 32u4 RFM95 LoRa Radios Can't Communicate

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mschutter05
 
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Joined: Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:34 am

Feather 32u4 RFM95 LoRa Radios Can't Communicate

Post by mschutter05 »

Objective

I have two Adafruit Feather 32u4 RFM95 LoRa Radio (PRODUCT ID: 3078). I am trying to get them to communicate using the two example sketches in the tutorial here:
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-fea ... m-9x-radio

Setup

feather on COM7:
- Quarter wave whip antenna soldered to the board as shown in the tutorial.
- DROK mini DC-DC step up converter (3V to 5V 2A) connected to the BAT and GND pins. The converter powers a Futaba S3003 servo.
- Pin 11 connected to the Futaba S3003 servo signal input.

feather on COM3:
- uFL SMT Antenna Connector (PRODUCT ID: 1661) soldered to the board.
- 900Mhz Antenna Kit - For LoPy, LoRa, etc (PRODUCT ID: 3340) connected to the uFL SMT connector.

Two USB cables supporting data transfer.

Problem

With the feather on COM7 running the receiver and the feather on COM3 running the transmitter sketch I get the following serial terminal output:
COM7 as receiver and COM3 as tansmitter.png
COM7 as receiver and COM3 as tansmitter.png (58.37 KiB) Viewed 268 times
With the feather on COM3 running the receiver and the feather on COM7 running the transmitter sketch I get the following serial terminal output:
COM3 as receiver and COM7 as tansmitter.png
COM3 as receiver and COM7 as tansmitter.png (38.02 KiB) Viewed 268 times
Both radios initialize but only one message gets through and only when going in one direction. I can't tell from this which feather is causing the problem.

Troubleshooting

I have tried the following:
- uploaded the blink sketch to both feathers and both work as expected
- connected a lipo to the COM7 feather and controlled the Futaba S3003 over serial terminal
- tried RadioHead library downloaded from Adafruit and a newer one from airspayce.com with the same result
- same result before I soldered uFL SMT and added antenna to the COM3 feather
- similar results running (appropriately modified) rf95_reliable_datagram_client and rf95_reliable_datagram_server example sketches from the RadioHead library folder.

Could there be a hardware problem with one of the RFM95 modules? I wish I had tested both feathers before soldering anything. Thanks in advance for your help with this issue.

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adafruit_support_rick
 
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Re: Feather 32u4 RFM95 LoRa Radios Can't Communicate

Post by adafruit_support_rick »

I presume you've tried it without the servo connected?

How far apart are the feathers? Probably not very far, as it looks like they're connected to the same computer?

We can send you a replacement feather RFM95. You should be able to determine the faulty one by mixing and matching...
Please email [email protected] with a link to this post for a replacement

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mschutter05
 
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jul 26, 2017 1:34 am

Re: Feather 32u4 RFM95 LoRa Radios Can't Communicate

Post by mschutter05 »

I unsoldered the servo and boost converter leaving only the antenna attached to the feather on COM7 and had the same results when testing with the example sketches. There is only about 20cm distance between the boards. I also checked continuity between ground and the antenna pin to make sure nothing was shorted when adding the antennas. I will contact support and try to get a third 32u4 RFM95 feather board to narrow down which of these two is causing the problem.

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dsurgi
 
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Joined: Fri Oct 03, 2014 12:18 pm

Re: Feather 32u4 RFM95 LoRa Radios Can't Communicate

Post by dsurgi »

did this work? was the feather bad?

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