Back to Homepage

\(\sqrt{-1}\)eating.com

07/14/2025 to 07/20/2025

LoRa Chat, pseudo/vibe coding, LLMs

This week was fairly quiet, I went scuba diving in Tioga on Thursday. 🤿 It was my first-time diving with Thomas Stearns, he will be a great addition to our dive team. Andrew and Tiffany ran some errands in Duluth on Saturday morning. They returned to Duluth’s Best Bread on Superior to pick up a loaf of sourdough bread and a Carmel roll - they ended up having to stand in a very long line:)

Throughout the week, I used a couple of LLMs - ChatGPT-4 and Grok-3 - to develop a program that turns LoRa radios into chat devices. Thanks to hybrid communication, I combined lightweight pseudo-coding to outline what I wanted with vibe coding to arrive at a working program. LLMs are really incredible with getting microcontrollers and peripherals to work together. LLMs do not seem to be good at analog input. They really struggle with properly mapping a TFT screen for example. Lucky for us humans we have eyeballs and brains so adjusting the code is no problem.

The code I put together is available here in my GitHub repository. The following is a list of hardware and antenna information should you wish to assemble a couple of devices yourself.

Adafruit Feather 32u4 RFM95 LoRa Radio- 868 or 915 MHz - RadioFruit

TFT FeatherWing - 2.4" 320x240 Touchscreen for All Feathers - V2

uFL SMT Antenna Connector

SMA to uFL/u.FL/IPX/IPEX RF Adapter Cable

Lithium-Ion Polymer Battery - 3.7v 1200mAh

The following is needed if You choose to assemble a ¼ wave ground plane antenna. 📡

SMA Male RF Coaxial Adapter 4 Holes Panel Mount Solder Post Plug Jack Connector

Weller 260 Watt & 200W Professional Soldering Gun, this is a must have if you are soldering copper wire to the panel mount. A regular soldering iron will not get enough heat, fast enough, to a large enough area to make a proper connection.

You will need some 14 AWG copper wire which you can get from some scrap household electrical wire. And finally, but very important, here is a good 1/4 wave ground antenna calculator that is from John, M0UKD.

Have fun chatting!

End of blog. Thank you for reading!