Saturday, February 25, 2012

RF Booster Pack for LaunchPad


Texas Instruments (TI) just came out with a RF Booster Pack for the MSP430 LaunchPad experimenter system.

Description
The CC110L RF BoosterPack is a low-power wireless transceiver extension kit for use with the Texas Instruments MSP-EXP430G2 LaunchPad development kit. Based on the CC110L device, the on-board Anaren Integrated Radio (AIR) A110LR09A radio module with integrated antenna operates in the European 868-870MHz and US 902-928MHz ISM bands. The included software application, called AIR BoosterStack, demonstrates an example sensor network as well as network status reporting.
Download updated and additional documentation and software from Anaren.
NB! Note that you will need two MSP430 LaunchPad kits in addition to this kit in order to use the hardware as described in the Quick Start Guide.
http://www.ti.com/tool/430boost-cc110l#3

This is really inexpensive, $19.00 purchases a pair of transceiver boards; you will also need a pair of LaunchPad boards at $4.30 each. The software loaded easily, and within a few minutes I had a wireless link established between on transceiver hooked to the PC's USB, and another battery-powered transceiver. I put the battery-powered transceiver into my refrigerator (the signal strength was still very good) and took measurements using the supplied GUI (graphical user interface).  This kit provides a good starting point to hack in other sensors for a wireless sensor system.

The Parts list [Link]

My other interests [Link]

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