433MHz RF “Hello World” on the Raspberry Pi #RaspberryPi #PiDay @Hacksterio

Adafruit Radio Bonnets

Whitney Knitter writes on Hackster.io about getting 433 MHz communication going on the Adafruit RFM69 Radio Bonnet for Raspberry Pi.

Adafruit’s Radio Bonnets come in a few different flavors. I chose the RFM69 at 433MHz version (note: you have to choose the same frequency for radios you want to communicate with each other). The radio chip itself, the RFM69, is available on several different breakout/dev boards, but I found the Radio Bonnet to be the most getting started friendly because of it’s OLED display that can be utilized for status messages (I’m talking to you, printf debuggers) and the three push buttons on the front that can be used to trigger events such as packet transmissions.

Software libraries and examples are available in CircuitPython.

The RFM69 is operated by a microcontroller using an object-oriented library that packetizes messages for transmission and reception known as RadioHead. The RadioHead library is open-source and supports a variety of radios and transceivers that many have written driver libraries for. Since the RFM69 is a pretty popular transceiver, there are quite a few libraries that have popped up for it. Adafruit has done it’s own version using their CircuitPython framework. While it’s a very basic implementation of the RadioHead library in that it only handles “raw” packets.

Catch the whole walkthrough on Hackster.io.


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2 Comments

  1. Benjamin T. Rittgers

    You need a ham radio license to use that frequency. It’s easy to take the test and get one.

    KE0UNF

  2. Actually it’s in a free zone, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPD433

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