In my limited experience it’s not just the power output, it’s also the receiver lacking sensitivity compared to T-Beams. If one has to believe the SNR reported on the app, the difference can be as high as 7 dB in the same location with the same antenna!
Digging some more into this and talking to Bernd Giesecke:
RAK4631 GPIO 37 is power supply for RF switch
SX1262 DIO3 controls TCXO power
SX1262 DIO2 controls RF switch direction
It looks like we treat the board as an E22 setup, which appears to match this pin description.
I have to wonder if the units that work (and some work quite well) were initialized by the factory firmware and left running with those variables.
I have seen some systems say the TXCO voltage should be 1.8 and some say 2.4?
I’m just blindly poking at this point - I think these are THE best boards for fixed use so far and would love to have them work work.
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100% agree. These are by far the best boards for use as fixed repeaters which are vital for a reliable network.
@geeksville When you get minute, I’d be curious to hear your experience with this board.
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Doing more analysis today. Found that the SWR of the factory antenna is around 3. The same sweep of the TTGO factory antennas shows SWR of around 1.3-1.4.
I’m also having a range problem with my TTGO’s as well right now though - I’m going to downgrade them to .28 and see if it comes back around.
Also, both boards left outside for Solar work were crashed out when I got back to them. No lights or activity. On reboot they showed good battery power levels, so this is probably a bug.
.43 code.
I have also seen this bug. In the serial log there is a line about going into deep sleep for 30000 or so seconds. I have not created a bug for that and now i am AFK for a week.
This is after the reading of battery voltage was fixed.
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If it helps, I have been experiencing this bug since receiving my RAKs and flashing .38. I just shelved them until .43 came out and same issue. Regardless of power source, serial, solar, battery.
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Put two nodes together with the solar enclosures yesterday, both ran overnight fine on 1.2.43. Anyone know where the button code is located in the device repo?
The bug is getting worked now / properly replicated by the devs.
I’m looking into it now as well - I’m thinking the beginning of the right answer is to flat out disable power management on the RAK since the NRF52 is so efficient.
If that worked right, it would also clean up some of the difficulties with user experience when sleep occurs.
I really need to setup a dev environment over here to help out - I’m just too deep in projects.
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Does anyone know if IO2 and IO1 on the RAK5005 can be used with to power the modules on/off? I would like to be able to charge via solar with the RAK4630 and GPS powered off.
Thats an interesting question - and in some ways its almost unnecessary to turn the unit off when the power management is working right. You can just leave it run and charge with solar and it’ll still charge the battery just not as quick.
I am unaware if you can turn the modules off, but it does appear likely that if you do you will still get solar power to charge.
I don’t really need a power button, but it would be nice to hook one of those GPIO up to the user button. I dug around a little but couldn’t find the code where the buttons are mapped to pins.
I found this in configuration.h
// If the variant filed defines as standard button
#ifdef PIN_BUTTON1
#define BUTTON_PIN PIN_BUTTON1
#endif
#ifdef PIN_BUTTON2
#define BUTTON_PIN_ALT PIN_BUTTON2
#endif
You can define PIN_BUTTON1 and PIN_BUTTON2 in the variant.h for WisCore_RAK4631_board
I think that skould work.
Other boards have the pins configured directly in configuration.h.
I think the variants is how it will look for all boards in the future.
I am not sure which one of them is the USER button.
29 seems to be the actual PIN number from IO1, which is in the Variant file for the RAK4601, this is probably the incentive I need to get a local device build working 
I see the last post on here was August. I am curious if there has been any success in resolving the following issues with the RAK?
- Solar charging and rapid battery drain issues.
- Low power and limited range issues.
- Button issues.
I am really hoping to order a few, but I want to make sure it won’t turn into yet another dead project.
I see that @Muscles @Havealoha @thebentern appear to have built their systems. I would assume the battery does not come with the unit. I would like to ask if they might suggest a reputable battery supplier? Also, what else did you need to purchase to complete the kit? Other than the base board, the transmitter board, the solar box, and maybe a GPS antenna or the screen, what else would I need to order to make this a fully functional device that I can literally just install somewhere and expect it to work?
Also, I would be appreciative of any suggestions such as additions and/or modifications that improve the device in someway.
Thanks for any advice!
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These are ancient issues we have buttons working with the io board, solar is built in and the battery life and draw are much better than an esp32
There is a kit available pre-flashed now
The range issues seem to be related to specific settings, I got close to 2 mile range today on long slow in a city.
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Thank you Garth. I appreciate the response. I think I’ll swing for a few of these. I really just want to get up and running and then I plan to dive deeper into the code and firmware to learn how it works at the core.
Jared
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My range issues resolved over time. I didn’t change anything on my side but firmware flashes and now it works great.
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How far we have come in just a year…
We can now update the RAK bootloader and the Meshtastic firmware using a cross-platform GUI (meshtastic-flasher). See Using Meshtastic Flasher | Meshtastic for more info.
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What kind of range are you getting?