smôl ARTIC R2 Hookup Guide
PaulZC Introduction
smôl is a new board format and, as the name suggests, they're really small!
The smôl ARTIC R2 Peripheral Board is a complete satellite transceiver for the ARGOS satellite network.
When we designed our ARGOS Satellite Transceiver Shield - ARTIC R2, we knew that people would want to use it for applications like wildlife tracking. In fact, all programs using ARGOS have to be related in some way or other to environmental protection, awareness or study, or to protecting human life. But what if you want to develop something much smaller? Say, a small dart for whale tracking, or a small backpack for avian tracking. Or you just need your battery to last for months. smôl is designed to meet those needs.
Each smôl board measures just 1.60" by 0.42" (40.6mm by 10.7mm). We made the boards just wide enough so we could squeeze USB-C and 16-way Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC) connectors on there. Some of the boards have components on both top and bottom layers which again helps keep the boards small.
smôl boards are designed to stack one on top of the other, using 16-way 0.5mm-pitch FPCs to provide the interconnect from one board to the next. Each board has an IN FPC connector on the bottom layer and an OUT FPC connector on the top layer. The boards stack in a zig-zag daisy chain; signals and power are passed from one board to the next up and down the chain through the FPCs.
Required Materials
As a minimum, you're going to need a suitable antenna:
The ARTIC R2 Peripheral Board is part of the smôl ecosystem. Why not pair it with one of the smôl Processor Boards?
To be able to reduce the sleep current below 10µA, you're going to want to pair the ESP32 with one of our intelligent smôl Power Boards:
Of course, a satellite tracking system needs to know where it is. Why not add a smôl ZOE-M8Q GNSS board to your smôl ecosystem?
Don't forget that you will need Flexible Printed Circuits to connect your smôl boards together. You're going to need one FPC per board. Our 36mm FPC is the perfect length if you want the smôl boards to stack neatly, one on top of the other.
Need to do some prototyping with smôl? Or want to connect your smôl stack to another Qwiic board? The smôl Header is perfect for that:
Suggested Reading
This is the hookup guide for the smôl ARTIC R2 Peripheral Board. Click the button below if you want to find out more about smôl itself:
Click the button below if you want to find out more about communicating with ARGOS and the ARTIC R2:
We recommend taking a look through the following tutorials if you are not familiar with the concepts covered in them: