#398 – An Interview with Felix Rusu

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• Felix has been running LowPowerLab since 2011 after a career in software engineering and attending school at ASU.
• While evaluating RF modules, he started with RFM12B, now obsolete
• RFM69
  • Chip from Semtech (but custom packaged for HopeRF)
  • Module by HopeRF
• Also can use RFM95/96 with LPL devices for LoRa projects
• Range for RFM69 is a couple hundred meters to a couple kilometers
• Battery life is about 1-2 years without lots of tweaking to the code
• Moteinos are the main product, they can be customized with modules and flash.
• These are based off the Arduino Uno and use an Microchip (Atmel) 328P for the processing. A newer version uses the SAMD21.
• The power can get down below 10 uA while sleeping, including radios. During transmit, the power is in the 10s of milliamps.
• There is an RFM69 library that gets you started quickly using the RF side of things
• The community has many resources including tutorials and a forum.
• Felix recommends starting with the Mailbox Project which uses the MotionMote kit.