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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on June 27, 2012 at 8:44am

You need to put just the radio in there.  Not the whole dev board!

How much do those cost BTW?

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Permalink Reply by Dan G on June 27, 2012 at 9:34am

Well I don't have a way to wire in the voltage, ground, and RX/TX without it, and even if I do solder onto the tiny 60-pin connector I'm missing some sort of logic level conversion.

The whole dev kit was $900, don't know how much the individual radios are.

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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on June 27, 2012 at 10:16am

You need to get a wired connector plug and put standard header pin connectors on one end.  If you need TTL level conversion then use a cheap one from sparkfun.com

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8745

It's $2.

What power in do you need and what TTL levels are you using?

That big dev board just looks silly in a little plane with all those bulky serial connectors.  It will be well worth it to properly set it up.

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Permalink Reply by Dan G on June 27, 2012 at 12:35pm

Well the connector that is on the bottom of the radio is a AVX-Kyocera 5046 Series 60 pin, which I can't seem to find any sort of adapter for, and I don't feel like I can reliably solder to.  There is a breakout board from microhard but it isn't much smaller than the dev board and it costs $50.

I have a level converter that I used for another radio, and the input voltage to the radio is 3.3VDC, or 9-30VDC into the dev board.

The 60 pin connector (which I would have to solder to) with my finger:

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Permalink Reply by Jake Stew on June 27, 2012 at 1:03pm

Wow!  Is there no sort of cable or anything?  You really don't want to be flying around with the whole dev board.

All you should really need for the radio is tx, rx, +3.3v, and ground lines.  At some point this should essentially be a transparent serial modem.  I would think they would have some sort of connector to provide this sort of connection.

You might have to contact them to work this out.  There has to be some sort of cable that attaches to this port from which you could pull the proper wires and put standard header pin connectors on.

The level shifting on the TTL should be easy.  Someone out there must also know a good BEC for the 3.3v power.

I just can't see throwing the whole dev board in there as weight is everything, and that is a whole lot of weight you don't need.

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Permalink Reply by Dan G on June 28, 2012 at 4:44am

Not that I've seen, and this is a board-to-board type connector so theoretically the only thing you would be connecting the radio to is a board with this connector surface mounted on.  I called them the other day and the best they could do was to sell me the breakout board (which is still fairly large).  The packaged unit that the radio goes in is it on the dev board encased in a metal box, so I wouldn't be surprised if they just don't provide a connector to use just the radio.  The guy that I talked to recommended that I just try to solder the connections I need, and as much as I would hate to do that it looks like that's what needs to happen.

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Permalink Reply by Michele Santucci on January 31, 2013 at 3:28am

Hallo I'm currently designing a board that fits a microhard n920 radio unit (just the nano unit neither the ip rev nor the full dev board) into a very small board with a level translator. If you still need it I can send you the project (i mean schematics and gerber files).

Best Regards,

   Mike

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