Making Of …

Testing the Turtle boards and pre-loading the RadioShuttle software

The Heltec Turtle board (revision 1.2) is passing all quality tests during the final production testing. It is compatible with the RadioShuttle software and supports LoRa peer-to-peer communication. The development took years and represents very mature hardware and software. It utilizes an STM32L4 processor and powerful software libraries
The board power consumption is being verified to match design specification. It works up to 10 years on AAA batteries and includes powerful software libraries. The entire board design was about being extremely power efficient, for deployment with regular or rechargeable batteries. Alternatively, it can be powered via USB and will switch automatically to batteriy operation when the USB power fails
Every single board has been tested to ensure proper operation. Here it communicates via the simple LoRa “Ping” demo software. Final operation works with the RadioShuttle software which supports reliable and encrypted peer-to-peer message communication
The standing wave ratio (SWR) for the 868 MHz band is tested. The laptop is connected to the Turtle board via the USB Virtual COM port to allow issuing test commands
The radio transmission power is being tested; once we received a delivery of defective Semtech LoRa chips which did not provide enough transmission power. The problems have been solved with new chips, however continuous testing ensures that the promised quality is delivered
All boards are verified after production, initialized with proper LoRa device ID codes and pre-loaded with the RadioShuttle software. This allows using the boards right away for simple peer-to-peer field testing before driving into programming own solutions
Continuous testing of the Turtle boards in the Lab to ensure their performance. We once had a 50 µA power leakage due to a defective chip. Our design and testing process ensures that all Turtle boards offer excellent quality and great performance

We would like to thank everyone being involved in the design, development, production and marketing of the Turtle boards. Great job, we are so proud of this, our customers will love it.