As a precursor to design work on the hackers.town pager revision 2.0, I wanted to start learning to do the full design work on PCBs. I decided a small simple PCB would be the best way to do this, and I had just the project in mind.
I've been working on WrewOS for the T-LoRa Pager and wanted to expand the capabilities. Seeing that it had an expansion port on the top I decided to check and see if I could use that to wire up a CC1101 transceiver and do sub-ghz work. Using jumper wires and a cheap $10 CC1101 board I was able to test that yes - I absolutely can - use that port. Unfortunately no CC1101 boards are currently made to plug directly into the port, and running around with jumper wires and a board dangling from the pager would undoubtedly draw too much attention. Project Identified.
My first couple attempts at the design were met with failure - mainly from using the wrong footprints on the board (the manufacturer wanted specific ones), but revision 3.0 has been accepted for manufacturing and passed the review process so it should work.
It features two antennas (one for 315/433 and one for 868/915), a CC1101 transceiver, and all of the ports wired to the correct pin positions to be able to plug directly into the pager expansion port and just... work. IF I didn't screw up.
A fun little project, I'm excited to get my hands on the prototypes.