I had high hopes this would supply a wireless link for an ongoing project, but its a complete dud.

Despite their drawbacks, my projects are usually breadboarded, as my lack of design expertise generates a lot of experimentation and modification. The width of the board with the ground rails uses all the width for connections on the usual breadboard, so your competitor’s format works better most of the time. I seem to end up usually needing a power bus, so all those ground connectors only solve half that problem.

A great use of your skills would be better radio software support. The third party libraries usually used are short on explanation and perhaps a little long on attitude for a packet radio beginner, and contain inconsistancies like setting the power one way on the server and then adding a boolian on the client, or setting the frequency in a not if statement. I finally ended up figuring most of it out from Nate’s kill switch article.

I like the clear labels and QWIIC connector make for a quick start. It works and seems to be fairly robust. It has adequate mounting holes to include in a real project! I understand the other review's concern about the layout for prototyping. But for me the QWIIC allows minimal the soldering to get where i want to go.

It did not work well out of the box, but the support team was able to patch an issue in the library and get things working promptly. Thank you! (Note: use 1.5.3 SparkFun SAMD board defs for the working version.)

The Hookup Guide is a little short on details (for example: it explains that connecting the two LoRa jumpers on the back of the board puts the board in LoRa mode. But it does not explain what mode is enabled by leaving the jumpers disconnected). The "SWITCH" pin through holes are not explained, but can be "sort-of" inferred from the schematic.

Also, there are many fiddly configuration changes in the libraries. But if you are careful, you can make them all correctly.

We recently bought this board to use as a SAMD LoRa node on our deployment for TTN here in San Salvador. Everything seems perfect but there is a couple of issues with this design:

1st: Documentation is a little bit of a mess and the instructions about the libraries to use are confusing. There are several Libraries recommended on the tutorial but some of them simple don't work directly on the SAMD. Also there is an error in the tutorial for The Things Network were SPI pins for the radio are wrong.

2st: Why there is no JTAG port? I mean... This is a "PRO" board. Pros tend to like to have tools to debug the boards. LoRa is a complex protocol and trying to debug only using UART is a PITA. With the instructions wrong on the tutorial we literally had to solder a couple of wires directly on the chip to extract the SWD lines to be able to connect a JTAG debugger and find the errors because the board didn't even boot.

In general the other features are fine and the quality is the one that one expects from Sparkfun. But for a PRO board and for LoRa this one didn't convinced us.

The board's SWD pins are only available via unlabeled testpoints that depend on a proprietary, Sparkfun-facility-only bed of nails fixture. Sparkfun, if you are unwilling to include a 0.05" ARM Cortex connector (or bring out the pins to the header), at least consider using a standard bed of nails PCB footprint like a Tag-Connect (or standardize on a Sparkfun-sold equivalent). Other disappointments include no documentation on what the ARM comes programmed with, omission of USB ESD and shield components recommended in the SAMD21 datasheet, and a circuitous PCB layout of the critical USB differential traces. Finally, the BOOTPROT configuration was not set, leaving the bootloader wholly unprotected from getting 'bricked'; the only recovery in that scenario would be the SWD pins that the board doesn't provide.

Want to really like this board, but in order to get it into low power mode you must cut a trace. I have bricked 2 of my 3 devices attempting to do this. unsure why they continue to sell this board as currently designed as the problem has been acknowledged and fix posted in their support forums.

1. I hate the Qwiic! Especially when you remove the connect points for those signals!
2. LoraWan cannot be made to work without knowledge of incorrect documentation and specific library versions.
3. Sparkfun reverses battery pins from general industry norms. One has to purchase batteries from Sparkfun, Remove and re-terminate the JST, or wire a separate JST to the battery pins. Totally a hassle. If you forget to double check, then you cook the efuse. No reverse polarity protection here. This was the final straw for me. An inadvertent swap of batteries on the desktop let the magic smoke out. Good riddance!