Modtronics Australia's TinyWireless Is a PIC32 Dev Board Built for Low-Power Radio Projects
Surprisingly powerful board includes a 50MHz PIC32 and an RFM68HW module in one of three ISM band variants.
Sydney-based Modtronics Australia has added a compact Microchip PIC32 development board built with wireless projects in mind to its Tindie store: the tinyWireless.
"The tinyWireless offers a unique PIC32 or PIC24 microcontroller development board with integrated HopeRF RFM69HW ISM band wireless module," Modtronics explains of its creation. "Our tinyWireless development boards offer a flexible development solution. They can be used as an independent development board or can be mounted in a solderless breadboard as part of a larger project."
The PIC32 variant of the tinyWireless is built around a Microchip PIC32MX250F128D, running at up to 50MHz and offering 32kB of RAM and 128kB of flash program memory. The RFM69HW module, meanwhile, offers +20dBm output power with a claimed range of over half a mile and is available in 433MHz, 868MHz, or 915MHz variants selected at purchase. The board includes 35 input/output (IO) pins with user-configurable functions, alongside two UART, two SPI, two I2C buses and five 16-bit timers.
"Software can be written natively in C/C++ and compiled using Microchip's Free XC32 C/C++ compiler," Modtronics notes. "TinyWireless also supports Microchip's Harmony Integrated Software Framework, which supports abstraction of the PIC32 hardware from the programmer, speeding up software development."
"In addition, tinyWireless development boards are able to run your favorite Arduino sketches, using a number of open source tools such as chipKit MPIDE or Pinguino. TinyWireless has an Fubarino Mini compatible footprint to simplify Arduino use with the chipKit MPIDE."
The tinyWireless PIC32 board is now available on Modtronics' Tindie store at $37, plus $5 for an optional antenna.