I’m so happy I found you all. About a year ago I purchased a handful of RAK815 boards with the intent of hacking around with some of the capabilities that meshtastic is doing right now!
With that in mind, I have been trying to take the latest code and build around the nrf platform and I’m not having a lot of luck. Would anywhere here be able to:
give some feedback as to what issues I might encounter with the RAK platform. i.e. - am I completely wasting my time or is it worth testing on this hardware?
give me a quick “getting started” on how best to do builds on platformio when switching from the tbeam/esp to nrf. I tried what I thought was the right way in platformio.ini but i get a lot of library dependency failures.
It’s been a while since I’ve put my head really into this space but I’m ramping back up. If anyone has the time and patience to help me get started I am able to run with it. I think these RAK boards are pretty capable and it seems like adding more hardware support to the project is a good thing.
Hmm. I hadn’t heard of that board and it looks pretty nice.
I suspect the problems you encountered building for NRF52 are related to some bug fixes I’ve made to the adafruit NRF52 arduino lib. I haven’t yet pushed them up to their github because I didn’t realize anyone besides me had a NRF52 board that has the right radio.
In the next couple of days (before Friday certainly) - I’ll add a “how to build for NRF52” page to the docs. You’ll have to create a few symlinks inside the platform IO tool tree until my fixes are accepted.
If you wanna add support for this board I think that’s awesome! It should be not too hard because it seems quite similar to my nrf52840dk + sx1262 tree.
Agreed - when I encountered this project I literally cheered out loud. Thank you for all your efforts. Once I get a build even sort-of working, I will do my best to contribute. A little crawl/walk/run because I need to learn some of the ropes around PIO and this hardware… everything I had done to this point was pure Arduino IDE and really explicit library support and it was all well over a year ago.
The primary errors are all in variant.h (if memory serves) - which is probably related to your patched adafruit library.
I’ll keep an eye out. Seeing your instructions will help me connect some of the dots I’m missing, for sure.
Heya - I’ve been looking and I didn’t see any docs for getting started with unsupported platforms like the RAK yet. I know this is a niche board and you are working on other NRF52-based options.
Curious if anyone here can help me get building on the rak815 I mention in earlier posts. The board details already have some work done on them.
I’m just really unsure which items might need to be fixed/patched/completed for the code to build for a specific different board like I have here. I realize this is probably has a non-trivial answer. Would be great for any guidance anyone might have. I have the boards and the jlink ready to go, I’d be thrilled to walk through a little guided troubleshooting.
Sure thing. Here’s some tips that occur to me (happy to help if you have other questions - also you might want to join our recently created dev chat - see other post):
This board looks ‘fairly’ similar to the NRF52840-DK devboard I added support for. See the nrf52dk target in platformio.ini so I don’t think it will be too hard to get going.
You’ll need to install the adafruit bootloader on the board. See here to get started (also they have some great tutorials)
My build is currently targeting the nrf52840, but the 52832 is fairly similar (just less RAM and flash)
Currently the BLE link is not supported on the NRF52 (though I have tested it works) - Adding support for this is one of my few remaining 1.0 workitems.
The USB serial link is supported though for connection to phone/computer.
Only myself and (maybe one other person?) have been building for the NRF52 currently (because I didn’t know about this board and no other ‘off the self’ NRF52+lora boards) so the NRF52 support might be a bit less solid than the ESP32 ;-). If you encounter problems don’t hesitate to ping me because it might be I can easily help
That board looks interesting and I might buy one to play with.
Hmm - I’m not personally very interested in the BLE mesh stuff because the range is so short. Lora gives a few km (at a minimum), “long range” BLE’s max range is 1km.
when ready, we have some ideas to include in the NRF52XXX, one of them is to include INTERNET access to it, to “expand” the LORA to worldwide, what do you think ?
We already implemented NRF52XXXX with WIFININA, ETHERNET and AT.
Extending the mesh, beyond the limits of LoRa, especially by MQTT and Matrix, has been more broadly discussed here: Proposal for global messaging support
