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radio.md

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Mesh Radio
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radio
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Long-range wireless node

{{}} includes an optional long-range wireless mesh network transceiver that operates on either 433, 868, or 915 MHz license-free ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) frequency bands. Using lower frequencies than those of the 2.4 or 5.8 GHz ISM bands enables much better coverage to be achieved especially when the nodes are within buildings.

{{}} is available with 2 radio transceiver options. The first is compatible with the Jeelabs, Moteino and EmonCMS nodes and can thus enable the Raspberry Pi as a gateway or master controller. Ardhat uses the high power verion of the HopeRF module, the RFM68HCW.

The second uses the LoRaTM RF physical layer, a form of spread spectrum modulation that significantly increases the available link budget. This option uses the HopeRF RFM95/96W.

With both options, the radio nodes are driven by the Arduino processor, so they can be maintained at very lower power, only waking up the Raspberry Pi when required.

The recommended library is the the Radiohead library from Airspayce, as this supports both RFM69 and RFM95 modules. In addition, the radio manager also supports several different types of radio network configuration:

  • RHDatagram Addressed, unreliable variable length messages, with optional broadcast facilities.
  • RHReliableDatagram Addressed, reliable, retransmitted, acknowledged variable length messages.
  • RHRouter Multi-hop delivery from source node to destination node via 0 or more intermediate nodes, with manual routing.
  • RHMesh Multi-hop, delivery with automatic route discovery and rediscovery.

Great documentation on the library is available [here] (http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/RadioHead/index.html)

You'll need at least 2 radios of course, preferably {{}}s :), but you can also use Jeelink, [Moteino] (https://lowpowerlab.com/shop/moteino-r4) or [Teensy] (https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/RIumMBtN) nodes. Prepare the Ardhat board by attaching an antenna to the board.

Do not load the driver without an antenna attached, as running the transmitter without an appropriate load could cause permanent damage to the radio module

Then install the Radiohead library into the Arduino library folder, either from the Arduino GUI Library Manager or alternatively from the console using the excellent Platformio code builder, which natively supports both Radiohead and {{}} .

There are a large number of examples provided with the library, but the RF69_client and RF69_server sketches are a great starting point.

In both cases, you'll need to make sure you've set the frequency correctly, depending on the {{}} radio module you have. Do this on the line

if (!rf69.setFrequency(868))

Also, double check you have set the right SPI SS and Interrupt lines. In the case of Ardhat, SS is on pin D10, and the interrupt is on D3, so this means the RF69 constructor should look like

// Singleton instance of the radio driver
RH_RF69 rf69(10, 3); // For RF69 on Ardhat

Then load up the RF69_server.pde sketch on the 'gateway' {{}}, and the RF69_client.pde sketch on the 'node'. On the client, you should get replies to sent messages with a RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication), and the activity LED will flash.

Once you have a basic radio link in place you can experiment with more advanced networking topologies, such as multinode mesh.