I might get crapped on for this, but where is basic assembly information?
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It's been year since I played with my original Lopys and realized one of them was malfunctioning. I couldn't setup a Lopy-to-Lopy and I suspect it was because one of them has a burnt radio due to me unknowingly powering on the Lopy radio without an antenna (this has been a known issue for a long time, still nothing on the pycom.io site).
Well a year later and I've been waiting to give the Fipy a chance so I now have 2 of them in front of me with the new expansion boards, yet I still see no information in the pycom online docs, in the unboxing and getting started sections, about assembly!
I'm looking through the forums and still I find no information on assembly. Maybe its buried and someone will kindly slap me with a link. I'm willing to be wrong, but right now I believe its pretty clear Pycom has been dropping the ball. I search for Youtube videos and there's nothing on the Fipy.
It's still not clear what the black antenna is used for specifically. There's 2 radio pins for external antennas. I have 1 black antenna. Is it the antenna for Lora or Wifi? Is the antenna interchangeable? Should I have ordered 2 antennas if I wanted to run both Wifi and Lora at the same time? What's the copper flat antenna with the 4 fingers for? M-LTE? It looks different than the LTE antenna on the pycom.io site. I mean I can assume a bunch of these answers but Pycom needs to spend a couple of hours and actually write an unboxing and assembly section of the docs site.
The Fipy (Pycom's latest boards) come in a box with the pycom.io/gettingstarted page, which doesn't actually include enough information to get started with the Fipy. It also has mixed information on how to get started with the Pysense and Pytrack boards.
The best I've found so far is the pinout image on the Fipy product page (https://pycom.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/fipyPinoutNewCompN.pdf). It at least mentions which pin outs are for which antennas. I could assume they're the same as on the Lopy.
Lastly, your webshop has to offer better information on what should be ordered. Is there a point to ordering a Lopy or Wipy without antennas? There's a list of boards and accessories. Do you know what its like to place an incomplete order that takes a month to arrive and you realize you're missing necessary parts? Maybe all pycom customers are European and shipping isn't long and expensive.
Sorry for this, but someone has to make an ass of themselves asking for obvious support. The forum is nice but the product I paid for and waited months to arrive points to a site that doesn't have basic assembly information.
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@duhmojo said in I might get crapped on for this, but where is basic assembly information?:
Hi,
Firstly I would like to thank you for your feedback. We always welcome constructive feedback and we will working on overhauling the getting started guide very soon soon. We certainly need to provide better information regarding the antennas in the getting started guide. The URL the package points to is just a heading chapter, you can then use the arrows to navigate to the next page. I admit this isn't very intuitive, this will be improved in our overhaul.To directly answer your queries:
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The long black antenna is for LoRa/Sigfox, the flat antenna with four fingers is for the cellular radio and you do not require to use a wifi antenna because the module has a on-board chip antenna (the beige coloured block on the bottom of the module). The pinout which can be found here: https://docs.pycom.io/chapter/datasheets/development/fipy.html details which connector is which.
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A guide on how to connect the module to a Expansion board, pysense or pytrack can be found here: https://docs.pycom.io/chapter/gettingstarted/unboxing.html#first
There are two tabs which take you through the process step by step including a link to a guide on how to update the pytrack/pysense firmware. (this is not the same as the modules firmware).
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