This breakout board offers an affordable solution for makers working with the popular RN2903A LoRa transceivers from Microchip, widely used for LoRaWAN. The layout of this breakout board is based on the the datasheet reference designs. This board breaks out all 14 GPIO pins to a row of 0.1" pin header, and the power and serial communication pins to a second row of 0.1" pin header The PGC and PGD pins for updating the firmware are also exposed. This version of the board has a built-in PCB trace antenna (designed in accordance to Microchip's specifications). While the PCB trace antenna does not get the same range possible with an external antenna, the PCB trace antenna performs pretty well without the size, expense and awkward shape of an external antenna.

A version with an SMA connector is available too with support for both the RN2903 and RN2483 (Europe)

The RN2903A is an updated version of the RN2903 - this comes with both a firmware and apparently a hardware rev as well; the differences are very slight - my understanding is that it was a "bug fix" type of change. At one point in time I saw a list of acknowledged bugs in an early version, most of which were clearly just firmware bugs, but I remember thinking "gee, how are they going to fix that in software?" - not long after, there was a 2-3 month period of time where nobody had any RN2903 or RN2483 for sale as they moved production to the RN2903A and RN2483A.

The pin layout for the serial and power pins is designed such that it can be plugged into breadboard alongside an Espruino Pico, and the pins will line up.

Assembled in USA.

Optional Level Shifter

Since many of our customers are using these with 5v microcontrollers (such as Arduino), we now offer a level shifter as an add-on. These level shifters are mass-produced 4-channel bidirectional fet-based level shifters. See the diagrams below for wiring examples.

Regulator options

This board can ship with three regulator options. If you have a regulator on the RN2483/RN2903 board, it can be used to supply 3.3v to the rest of the project (within the limits of the regulator - 1A, less if Vin exceeds 5v due to heat dissipation). See the wiring diagrams below.

No regulator - If you will already have a regulated 3.3v supply, there is no need to use a regulator on the RN2483 board. The board will be shipped with a 4.7uf cap installed on the pads for the output capacitor, but no regulator or input capacitor.

ZLDO1117 - The ZLDO1117 is one of the best 1117-series regulators available, and provides a dropout of around 1.1V at maximum load (meaning a minimum of 4.4 V input to get 3.3v out), and permits a maximum input voltage of up to 18V.

AP2114 - The AP2114 is a modern LDO regulator that has much lower dropout than the 1117 series, as low as a few tenths of a volt. This allows it to put out 3.3v when powered from a 1S LiPo battery. However, the maximum input voltage must not exceed 6 volts.

Wiring

Useful Resources

Generally speaking, anything that applies to the RN2483/A also applies to the RN2903A - The RN2483 came out first and has a larger following (particularly in Europe, where the maker culture seems to be closer to mainstream).

The Things Network is a thriving community dedicated to LoRaWAN which has a great deal of useful information available to makers experimenting with these sort of devices:The Things Network

For use with Espruino, see the Espruino RN2483 module documentation - the

For use with a Raspberry Pi, Michael Honaker of Beach Cities Software has written some demo code that can be valuable to help get started, available from his Github: Interfacing with C Interfacing with Python