I started playing with LoRa when I bought some RFM95 module, it was really boring and messy playing with wirings…
So I decided to make a board, the idea was to make a pcb to put RFM95 and Arduino Pro Mini, power the whole board with 2 AA battery.
And this was my pcb design…
Yep, I forgot the ground plane…
Soldering all together with a battery holder this is the final result.
I removed the power led and the regulator from the Arduino to improve the battery life. With this setup the board drain around 5uA (I don’t have a good multimeter to measure small current). I’m using the watchdog to wake up the board every 1 second, but only send a message like every 30 minutes or so.
Anyway, this is my first board, the final result was great. Of course, I need to improve a lot of things for the next version, but the final result was great, especially the size and the idea of mounting the pcb on the battery holder.