Seeed Studio and Semtech have partnered to release the LR2021 LoRa Plus Development Kit, bringing high-speed long-range wireless capabilities to developers nearly a year after Semtech first announced the LR2021 transceiver chip. The kit addresses LoRa's traditional low data-rate limitations by supporting speeds up to 2.6 Mbps using FLRC (Fast Long-Range Communication) modulation, while maintaining compatibility with standard LoRa protocols across Sub-GHz (150 MHz to 960 MHz), 2.4 GHz ISM, and satellite S-band (1.9 GHz to 2.5 GHz) and L-band (1.5 GHz to 2.0 GHz) frequencies.
The development board pairs the Semtech LR2021 transceiver with a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF54L15 module featuring dual-core processing (Arm Cortex-M33 at 128 MHz plus a RISC-V coprocessor) and support for Bluetooth LE 6.0, Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Amazon Sidewalk, and NFC. The kit includes a 0.96-inch 128x64 OLED display, three Grove connectors for expansion, dual SMA antenna ports for separate Sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz operation, and Arduino Uno-compatible headers. Power consumption drops to as low as 470 nA in sleep mode and 5.7 mA during LoRa reception, with receiver sensitivity reaching -141.5 dBm at LoRa SF12.
Software support includes Zephyr RTOS integration through Semtech's LoRa Unified Software Platform (USP) and compatibility with LoRa Basics Modem for simplified LoRaWAN development. Linux users can leverage Semtech's LoRa Studio for Windows and Linux alongside the community-contributed Rust driver for the LR2021, while the XIAO nRF54L15 received official Zephyr Project support following a successful pull request merge. The platform supports ready-to-use examples for periodic uplink, geolocation, certification testing, and works with popular LoRaWAN network servers including The Things Network and ChirpStack. Developers can reference the Seeed Studio wiki for documentation and getting started guides.
The LR2021 LoRa Plus Evaluation Kit is available for $99 (€91) on the Seeed Studio store and includes two complete development boards with antennas for immediate point-to-point testing. The kit ships in three regional variants (EU868, US915, and CN490) with frequency-tuned antennas for each market. The board measures 6.5 cm x 7.3 cm x 2.7 cm (2.6 inches x 2.9 inches x 1.1 inches) and operates across temperatures from -40°C to +85°C (-40°F to +185°F).
