[LoRaWAN/TTN] Hardware / Software Options to build a Gateway

[Juergen]

I was reading a lot about LoRa the last days and I feel a little bit lost.

I’m wondering what would be the best solution for users of this project to collect data from LoRa clients and submit it to swarm.hiveeyes.org. This thread should help to get a overview of possible hardware / software combinations and I will extend the informations from time to time.

As far as I understand there are multiple possible hardware / software combinations we could use:

• Arduino with old MCU (ESP8266, Atmega328, …) with software based LoRa (LMIC)

• Only with one channel non-standard LoRa.
• Very short on resources, difficult to run a gateway on.
• cheap

• Arduino with modern MCU (ESP32, Cortex M0?). with software based LoRa
  • Can we run full LoRa software Implementation with multichannel? Are there libs available for this?
  • Should be possible to run as gateway.
  • cheap
• Arduino with old MCU and hardware based LoRa
  • Full standard compatible LoRa with multichannel
  • Short on resources, difficult to run as gateway
  • Expensive LoRa modules
• Arduino with modern MCU and hardware based LoRa
  • Full standard compatible LoRa with multichannel
  • Enough resources for Gateway?
  • Expensive
• Rasberry Pie with software based LoRa
  • Can we run full LoRa software Implementation with multichannel? Are there libs available for this?
  • cheap
  • full linux, enough resources for gateway mode.
  • Maybe collecting audio files … and more
  • webserver possible
• Rasberry Pie with hardware based LoRa
  • expensive
  • most complete solution (?)
  • and all other benefits of RasPie.

Just a very rough list. Would be great to fill this with more info, maybe as a Wiki page. What is not clear to me currently: is there a software based LoRa solution that supports multicannel and auto group selection? (or what is it called, don’t remember) just like the hardware based solutions with a full official LoRaWAN™ protocol stack?

Would RasPie based solution be the better platform for a gateway or would a modern MCU Arduino be good enough too?

Again, I’m very new to the topic and many of my observations may be wrong. Please tell me and I correct any mistakes.

[Andreas]

Dear @Juergen,

LoRa (PHY) and LoRaWAN (MAC) are two totally different beasts, even though one is building upon the other.

LoRa

It is totally feasible to run LoRa nodes and gateways on small AVR MCUs with RFM95 transceiver modules. We already do this, read on my dear…

Node

The most simple solution for telemetry data transmission using LoRa would be using an AVR MCU with an RFM95 transceiver and our “generic” firmware based on the RadioHead library, which is already supporting this kind of setup. See also:

Next-generation sensor- and telemetry-node firmware

Generic firmware for RFM69 and RFM95 (LoRa) Welcome to the “generic” firmware, a flexible software breadboard for sensor-, transceiver- and gateway-nodes. This is now based on the RadioHead and BERadio C++ libraries for radio transmission. For building it, we switched to the fine Arduino-Makefile. The intention is to have a single firmware capable running on the sensor node, the protocol transceiver and the gateway side for making a multihop FSK scenario reality (RFM69 -> RFM95 -> MQTT). Welco…

Welcome, einsiedlerkrebs!

Bäm! @einsiedlerkrebs starts publishing data using a multihop FSK setup (RFM69 -> RFM95 -> LinkIt -> BERadio -> MQTT). About the setup The Generic firmware is running in different modes on three AVR MCUs (node, transceiver, gateway). A HopeRF RFM95 LoRa RF transceiver module is wired to the ATmega32U4 of the LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo. The BERadio gateway is running on the LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo and does the convergence to the MQTT bus. More details @einsiedlerkrebs writes about his efforts at 76…

Please let us know if you have any further questions on that.

Gateway

The most simple solution would be to use a RaspberryPi with a customized JeeLink device.
However, it’s also possible to run the software stack on a more compact SoC machine, e.g. the LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo.

@einsiedlerkrebs wrote some lines about, enjoy reading:

Embedded Radio-to-IP Gateway (AVR)

About AVR-based Radio-to-IP gateway solutions Introduction As the top dog RFM libraries like the LowPowerLab RFM69 library by Felix Rusu and the RadioHead library by Mike McCauley used to work best on the AVR, this is currently the most stable variant implementing such a gateway. All implementations showed here have these attributes in common: Send radio messages from the sensor node Receive radio messages on the gateway side Forward them to the UART interface of the AVR Receive messages fro…

LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo as RFM95 to Wifi-BERadio gateway

Introduction The general idea about this setup is to use the LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo as WiFi gateway for the RFM95 radio on the hardware layer and as UART-to-MQTT gateway on the transport layer. Since the 7688 is capable of running LEDE/OpenWrt and Python, BERadio should work out of the box. The Duo comes with the ATmega32U4 as a realtime processor for the radio. LEDE has AVRDude on board so it can flash the ATmega with .hex files. This is the corresponding boards.txt. Hardware Setup [image] P…

LoRaWAN

LoRaWAN requires a more sophisticated protocol stack, as i understand from your post you already recognized.

Node

The most robust way to go would be using the integrated Microchip RN2483 LoRaWAN modem, at least from my consideration. The module itself looks pretty decent and the software support by RN2483-Arduino-Library and Sodaq_RN2483 does not look bad either. See also:

LoRaWAN hardware

LoRaWAN Endgeräte Module Hier geht es um integrierte LoRaWAN Modems, die meist aus einem LoRa-kompatiblen radio transceiver Modul sowie einem dedizierten Mikroprozessor (command application programming interface processor) bestehen. Auf diesem läuft oft eine proprietäre Firmware, die ihrerseits die Ansteuerung über eine meist ASCII-basierte Kommandosprache via UART Schnittstelle ermöglicht, vgl. Modemsteuerung über AT Befehle o.ä… Daher muss für das entsprechende Modem nicht unbedingt eine Ardu…

[LoRaWAN/TTN] Arduino with LoRaWAN modem "Microchip RN2483"

As the Microchip RN2483 currently seems to be the most popular integrated LoRaWAN modem on the market, it also has the best library support for the Arduino ecosystem. See also:

For the “Arduino Core - Tiny” variant using an AVR MCU, see also:

LoRaWAN software

IBM LMiC und Derivate Von den IBM Research Labs in Zürich kommt die kanonische Softwareimplementierung unter der Eclipse Public License (EPL). Ursprünglich innerhalb des IBM Long-Range Signaling and Control (LRSC) Projektes entwickelt, ist die LoRaMAC-in-C (LMiC) Bibliothek die Urmutter aller freien Implementierungen von LoRaWAN. STM32 Snapshots der originalen Version für STM32 Prozessoren finden sich derzeit u.a. bei: https://github.com/mcci-catena/ibm-lmic https://github.com/mirakonta/lmic …

The latter would probably be more experimental, but of course we always like to hear from people making it possible :-).

Gateway

Please have a look at the sections “LoRaWAN Gateways” and “TTN Gateways” on

LoRaWAN hardware

LoRaWAN Infrastruktur Update: We are also maintaining a collection of LoRaWAN gateways/concentrators at https://community.hiveeyes.org/tags/lorawan-gateway. Concentrators IMST iC880A - LoRaWAN Concentrator iC880A is able to receive packets of different end devices send with different spreading factors on up to 8 channels in parallel. […] In combination with an embedded Linux board like Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone, Banana Pi and the HAL software from https://github.com/Lora-net, a complete LoRaW…

I would not start to try to build a LoRaWAN gateway based on an AVR MCU, i don’t think it’s even possible.

When already doing LoRaWAN, we aim to join the open, distributed TTN network. So we will choose our LoRaWAN gateway for compatibility with TTN. As we always like to run a system which is as open as possible, we probably will give the DIY solution based on a RaspberryPi a shot:

Home

If we won’t find the time, we might just buy a final product :-).

Cheers,
Andreas.

[Andreas]

Dear @Juergen,

regarding …

LoRaWAN/TTN

As we haven’t had our fingers on TTN yet, we don’t know about any details about how data actually moves around. Most probably, we should conceive a program listening to messages of the TTN MQTT API and forwarding them to swarm.hiveeyes.org, similar to what “ttn-ulm-dustfetcher” already does:
https://github.com/verschwoerhaus/ttn-ulm-dustfetcher

We are happy to support you as soon as there’s demand for this - just let us know!

[Juergen]

Thanks for all the valuable information. I will look into this topic again when I managed to build my scale and set up my Autonomo.

[weef]

Claus Kuehnel was in the recent press with a nice LoRaWAN (to be precise: TTN) hands-on with the Dragino-LoRa-Ardu shield and the Raspi-LoRa-GPS hat (RFM92/RFM95; in german):

The Things Network: LoRaWAN für Maker und Entwickler

corresponding repo:

ckuehnel/LoRa

Zusatzhinweis: lora_shield_ttn_tempC.ino aus o.g. Repository benutzt ebenfalls die LMiC Bibliothek.

[weef]

LoRa-USB-WLAN - LUW

Another femto gateway for LoRa/LoRaWAN, this one by Mr. Tostmann - like the JeeLink, but with an ESP8266:

– busware.de : LUW

[permagriculture]

I think these at around 10 euro are now one of the cheapest gateway (or node) solutions now

(edit: product page @ChengDu Heltec)

How to set up:

Big ESP32 / SX127x topic part 1