Daniel | July 3, 2020

Andrew | May 30, 2020

Great little product!

For Grasshopper LoRa/LoRaWAN Development Board

Love this little product, nice build quality, great libraries, documentation is solid given that it's all open source. Shipping was super fast, I think I got the tracking number the day I placed the order. Setting up and using the device was about as easy as any arduino product. The reliable range with default settings, in dense urban environment, with chip antennas was about 1000 ft / 300M. Line of site easily greater than 1/2 mi / 1.6km. Excellent product!

Quick question for you, to use the u.fl antenna connector instead of the chip antenna, do I need to cut the connection to the chip antenna? Or just attach a connector?

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Response from Tlera Corp | May 30, 2020

Thanks for the detailed review and kind words.

For testing you may simply connect an external antenna. If you want to use the external antenna in the field or permanently attach it you can remove the 0 Ohm jumper resistor connecting the RF trace to the chip antenna (small black passive in line with the RF trace) and disconnect the on-board chip antenna without damaging anything. If you ever want to return to chip antenna use, just solder on another 0 Ohm jumper.

I wonder if the range might be increased if you take advantage of the higher output power available? Something hard for us to test accurately.

Keith | Dec. 16, 2019

Works Perfectly

For Grasshopper LoRa/LoRaWAN Development Board

I purchased two Grasshopper boards to prototype a LoRaWAN product I am working on using MachineQ gateways.

The build quality is excellent, and the boards arrived quickly and well-packaged. I used the example software to connect to MachineQ without any issues. The Prototype is going to require some modifications, so having the schematic and board layout available is very helpful. The complete LoRaWAN library is taking up about a third of the flash and about a quarter of the dynamic memory in the STM32L0, so there is plenty of room for my code.

I'm using an in-door MachineQ gateway, and getting a range of at least a half-mile through other buildings and into my car. This is really good range, especially for a broadband chip-and-trace antenna. The micro-fl connector will allow me to add a better antenna for better range, but I have not tried this yet because I really don't need it. A half-mile in an urban environment is great.

I had a couple of questions, and Kris (onehorse) answered them quickly and courteously.

If you need a small, pretty much bullet-proof, and well-documented LoRaWAN solution, this is it.

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Response from Tlera Corp | Dec. 16, 2019

Thanks for the nice review Keith!

Glad to know the one-size-fits-all chip antenna is working so well. I have never done any kind of serious range testing but anecdotal reports such as this make me believe the useful range for most applications would be in the hundreds of meters.

Karl | Oct. 31, 2019

Great Development Board

For Grasshopper LoRa/LoRaWAN Development Board

The documentation was somewhat difficult to go through, but we were able to get the functionality we needed to work. I had an issue with the module not being picked up over usb, but I got a quick response how to solve that. Just exit Arduino, plug in the kit to usb, hold the boot button, then press the reset button. Overall, the examples were great and this module was a really great way to jump right into LoRaWAN for an absolute beginner like me. The LoRaWAN_Callbacks sketch has an example a of downlink for those that may have spent a few minutes longer than they should have trying to find that example.

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Response from Tlera Corp | Oct. 31, 2019

Glad you were able to make this work for you. Our goal is to make the Grasshopper development board easy to use but I agree we could do better on the documentation. Still, we hope programming via USB using the Arduino IDE outweighs whatever documentation deficiencies remain. The CMWX1ZZABZ-078 module is quite capable and the examples are there to help you get started. Just let us know if you have any trouble by sensing e-mail to tleracorp@gmail.com.

Christopher | Oct. 14, 2019