Reply To: Digi LTEBee on Mayfly v1.x

The purpose of the now-discontinued “EnviroDIY LTEbee Adapter” was to allow people to use the Digi brand LTE cellular module with the Mayfly v0.5 boards by doing 3 main thing:  providing

The purpose of the now-discontinued “EnviroDIY LTEbee Adapter” was to allow people to use the Digi brand LTE cellular module with the Mayfly v0.5 boards by doing 3 main thing:  providing sufficient power (current) to the cell module, connecting pin 13 of the Digi board to pin 12 of the Mayfly bee socket, and giving the user some LEDs to show status of the module (because the Digi boards have no lights themselves).   When I designed the Mayfly 1.0 boards last year, I included all those features into the Mayfly’s new design, so people can now use a Digi board without the need for the bulky EnviroDIY adapter board in between.

The Mayfly v1.0 and v1.1 boards have sufficient power on the bee socket now (1 Amp dedicated solely to the bee socket) so they no longer need that little jumper wire to connect between the Lipo socket and the cell module like on previous versions.  On Mayfly v1.0 and v1.1, the default setting is for the bee socket to be powered only when pin 18 is high.  This action is dictated by SJ18, so leave it as it is (set to D18) and make sure your Arduino sketch code has modemVccpin set to 18.

Then, to change the bee status pin from the usual Bee pin 12 to Bee pin 13, move the solder blob on SJ19 from 12 to 13.  This status pin is monitored by Mayfly pin D19, so in your code, make sure modemStatusPin is set to 19.

Then if you want to see when the modem is turned on (white LED) and it network status (blue LED – it’ll blink or be solid based on whether it is actively connected or not) put a small blob of solder on jumpers SJ16 and SJ17.

That’s all the changes you need to make to the v1.0 or v1.1 board in order to use a Digi cell board with the Mayfly.  If you ever decide to use an EnviroDIY LTE cell board (with the SIM7080 module on it), you’ll need to put solder jumper SJ19 back in its original position.  It’s fine to leave the Mayfly’s LEDs jumpered with the SIM7080 cell boards, but it’s kind of unnecessary since there are 2 LEDs already included on the cell board, making them redundant.

If you’re using the ModularSensors example sketch that’s currently on Github called DRWI_DigiLTE, note that it’s written for the v0.5 boards, so you’ll need to make the changes mentioned above for the modemVccPin (set it to 18 instead of -2) and then you also need to change the modemResetPin from 20 to A5.  Previous versions of the Mayfly had the modem reset pin wired to Mayfly D20, but all new versions of the Mayfly have the modem reset connected to A5.

That should be everything you need to do in order to get the Digi cell boards to operate on the Mayfly v1.0 or v1.1 boards.  Give that a try and let us know if it’s successful.

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