iLabs Challenger RP2040 LoRa
After the huge success of the Raspberry Pi Pico, other vendors have designed interesting boards around the RP2040 MCU. iLabs, based in Sweeden, offers a wide range of IoT-capable boards, including WiFi, Bluetooth and LoRa radios.
The iLabs Challenger RP2040 LoRa combines a RP2040 MCU and a RFM95W LoRa radio on a Feather form-factor board. Buying the board wasn't easy. The iLabs shop invoices in Swedish krona and requires an active PayPal account. However, some resellers list the board, like the The Pi Hut, where I bought three of them. |
Hardware
The board combines an RP2040 MCU with an 8 MB Flash memory and an RFM95W LoRa radio.
The board comes with male pins to solder, a USB Type-C connector and 8 MB of Flash. The antenna connection is a U.FL, contrary to a single cable to solder with the Moteino boards. iLabs lists the LoRa Antenna 868 MHz, a kit with a RF cable. The Feather form-factor, pioneered by Adafruit, opens compatibility to a large choice of accessories and FeatherWing extensions. |
Pins map
iLabs provides a printed pins map with the Challenger RP2040 LoRa.
The schematics are available as an Eagle project, and need to be converted into a PDF document. |
Software
The Challanger R2040 LoRa iLabs is rather short on documentation but provides some pointers for two environments: MicroPython and Arduino SDK.
For MicroPython, I haven't tested the example is Using Circuitpython on the Challenger RP2040 LoRa to send and receive data packets. For C++, the Arduino-Pico boards package by Earle F. Philhower provides an excellent support for the RP2040 and includes the definition for the iLabs Challenger RP2040 LoRa board, easing the configuration of the radio. For the radio, iLabs recommends a fork of the Arduino MCCI LoRaWAN LMIC library adapted to the Challenger RP2040 LoRa, to be used with a LoRaWAN gateway connected to The Things Network. The documentation includes Setting up TTN to receive messages from the Challenger RP2040 LoRa and Configuring and setting up an Arduino application for TTN. For a gateway-free operation, I tested different LoRa libraries and finally selected the Arduino-LoRa by Sandeep Mistry. It comes with excellent documentation. I managed to adapt the provided examples of the Arduino-LoRa library and run a gateway with two nodes. |
Ready-to-use Arduino-Pico configuration by Earle F. Philhower
Configuring the radio with Arduino-LoRa library
|
As a minimal radio project implies at least 2 radios and thus 2 boards, I couldn't find any practical way to select the board to upload the executable to. All the boards show up as RPI-RP2 volumes. The only solution so far consists on disconnecting the other boards.
Similarly, the debugging SWD signals are provided by small copper pads hidden on the rear of the board. I would have preferred a standard 2x5 0.05 SWD connector on the front. |
Conclusion
The iLabs Challenger RP2040 LoRa offers an interesting IoT-capable board, with a well designed hardware.
However, hardware doesn't make it all alone: software is key. If the board comes with the official support of the excellent Arduino-Pico by Earle F. Philhower, I would expect iLabs to provide a list of recommended LoRa libraries and more examples. A variant of the board, the Challenger RP2040 SubGHz, relies on the RFM69HCW instead and comes at a lower price. |
Pros
|
Cons
|
Wrap-Up
|
Links
Posted: 27 July 2022
Updated: 01 Aug 2022
Updated: 01 Aug 2022