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Design Files

Open source design files including Gerbers for the RAK833 LoRa Concentrator Hat can be obtained from Circuit Maker. Circuit Maker is a free PCB design tool from Altium. Designs can be imported into Altium Designer.

Description

This board is a Raspberry PI Hat for the RAK833 LoRa Concentrator Gateway Module.

It is smaller version of the popular RAK831. The RAK831 is larger, about the same footprint than a Raspberry PI and requires a breakout board to convert the RAK831’s 24 pin connector to the Raspberry PI’s 40 pin connector. The RAK833 is a more elegant industry standard PCI Express Mini Card form factor (Type F2).

The RAK833 module consists of a Semtech SX1301 Digital Baseband chip for outdoor LoRaWAN Macro Gateways and two Semtech SX1257 Transceivers. The USB interface is provided by an FTDI FT2232H.

It supports both a USB and SPI interface selectable via the SPDT_SEL pin. This makes the module ideal for Raspberry PI and other Embedded Linux platforms that do no expose USB on the expansion connector.

Variants of the module are available for four different frequency ranges, 433MHz, 470MHz (China), 868MHz (Europe) & 915MHz (North America) and with or without the USB interface (FT2232H).

The RAK833-SPI/USB-xxx Mini PCie Module can be purchased from AliExpress for US$119. The non-USB version, the RAK833-SPI-xxx is US$99

Pinout

The following table provides details of the allocated I/O.

Pin No. PI Name PI I/O Type Net Name Function
8 GPIO14/TXD0 OUTPUT UART_TX GPS Receive (For configuration)
10 GPIO15/RXD0 INPUT UART_RX GPS Transmit
19 GPIO10/SPI_MOSI OUTPUT PCIe_MOSI SX1301 SPI Slave Input
21 GPIO09/SPI_MISO INPUT PCIe_MISO SX1301 SPI Slave Output
22 GPIO25 OUTPUT PCIe_RESET SX1301 Reset
23 GPIO11/SPI_SCK OUTPUT PCIe_SCK SX1301 SPI Clock
24 GPIO08/SPI_CE0_N OUTPUT PCIe_CSN SX1301 Chip Select

Software

Instructions for installing the software can be found at https://github.com/Lora-net/packet_forwarder/wiki/Use-with-Raspberry-Pi

The packet forwarder is configured via a global_conf.json file. Pre-prepared configuration files for different frequency plans/countries on The Things Network can be obtained from https://github.com/TheThingsNetwork/gateway-conf/