iotSDR - How We Use the Microchip AT86RF215 Transceiver | Crowd Supply
Microchip’s AT86RF215 is a multi-band radio transceiver with dual Radio RF Front-ends—one sub-GHz and one at 2.4 GHz—that cover nearly all of the unlicensed IoT bands, making it ideal for all-in-one IoT solutions. iotSDR’s dual AT86RF215 chips open the door to next generation, multi-mode, multi-network IoT solutions in which a single gateway can host multiple IoT networks independently on different bands at the same time and in the same space. Both RF chips can be configured for I/Q streaming while baseband modulations are carried out on the FPGA side of the ZYNQ SoC. That modulation might take the form of FSK, O-QPSK, or one of the popular modulation schemes (such as Chirp Spread Spectrum) that run at the heart of LoRa® networks. Other IoT network solutions can be designed through the use of the IEEE-802.15.4 PHY cores built into the AT86RF215 chip.
Several of the applications we’ve been testing and developing rely on the feature set of the transceiver’s built-in baseband cores. One example is our Chat* application, which uses the radio chip’s IEEE-802.15.4 PHY cores. A high-level python driver running in Linux user-space makes it easier for a researcher or developer to play around with the AT86RF215 features and to rapidly test their own use cases.
