Since I learned about LoRa I was curious about getting a communicator. I always liked walkie-talkies, and given that I go camping a few times a year, having the ability to communicate in remote areas with people nearby would be handy. With that as my motivation I started to explore the ways to leverage LoRa devices to put together a communicator tool.

Here is the current solution, which is based on the keyboard FeatherWing, Adafruit Feathers and CircuitPython.

Parts:

• FeatherWing Keyboard from Solder Party – an elegant solution to providing a screen big enough for a messenger and a keyboard for user input.
• Feather M4 – This is a fairly capable module, given the flexibility of the keyboard/lcd combo you could add some code to run other software besides the lora module for a more capable device.
• LoRa FeatherWing – The radio chip, make sure to buy the one relevant to your region, 900 MHz (which gets software tuned to 915 MHz for the US)

See all the details in the blog post here and Hackaday article here.