I’m posting this because I have been reading about the new LoRa (long range) radio standards for IoT devices.
I’m looking for some others that might want to help build a LoRaWan gateway. I can buy most of the hardware but may need some help getting over some of the hurdles. It’s a totally cool thing. Things will be able to connect to the gateway over many miles and not need a SIM card or network connection themselves. It opens up a whole neat set of stand alone solar IoT devices to tell us about the world.
Any takers?
I’ve done some youtube searching and here is one or two of the links I’ve found…
I’d be happy to help. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time too. I think we could install it on the VHS roof in a weatherproof box and run a Cat5e cable down. Maybe use PoE.
What hardware are you thinking? Based on my research it seems the really cheap ones essentially just use a transceiver designed for a client node. This is only single channel and I don’t think it’s very worthwhile. Whereas the raspberry pi kit from Seeed is a nice entry-level “real gateway”.
Make sure you get a 915Mhz (North American) one. The 868Mhz frequency range is European and not legal for North America (or that’s my understanding).
I’ve gone ahead and purchased a PoE siphoner for Raspberry Pi. I can also arrange the PoE injector, cabling, and waterproof housing to complete the install at VHS. We just need a Pi3 and the LoRaWAN hat.
@RolandClarke I don’t think you’re on Slack yet. Join the #iot channel and we can discuss further. Let’s make this happen!
The one I linked above from Seeed is the only one I have (very limited) first-hand experience with running in a private indoor environment.
Unfortunately I don’t see much of anything about it at The Things Network’s forum. I think we should ensure we have something that works with TTN, since this will be somewhat of a community gateway if it’s hosted at VHS.
OK, so maybe this is a really dumb question, but I tried to join vanhack.slack.com but it says I need to be invited. Just joined VHS, so maybe this is something I wait for? sorry if its a noob Q.
If you go to http://membership.vanhack.ca there’s a tab (I believe it is called get involved or something like that) where you can generate your slack invite.
@RolandClarke, @Rob_MacKenzie, and I met up today to get our Lorawan gateway up, and I’m happy to report it’s online. We still need to tidy up the configuration, enable the GPS module, and probably fix problems that are yet to be discovered.
We didn’t quite get a LoRa node programmed and working, but figure we can do that from home now that the gateway is mostly operational.
We also didn’t have time to give it a proper waterproof housing so it’s temporarily in a tupperware bin. It should have reasonable coverage around false creek. If you have 915Mhz Lora hardware, see if you can send packets to it! Join #iot in slack to discuss.