On Friday 13 January we installed the first Things Network gateway in Stellenbosch. The location is on the roof of one of the Octo Place buildings in central Technopark. Because it was a Friday the thirteenth, the gateway went offline after a few hours. It cost us a debugging exercise on Saturday morning to find that the Raspberry Pi, which is at the heart of the gateway, experienced an ethernet failure. After replacement of the Pi we had a working gateway again.
We are actively measuring the coverage of this gateway using TTN Mapper. The current results can be seen at: http://ttnmapper.org/?gateway=stellenbosch-technopark&type=radar
The components we used to build this gateway are:
- Raspberry Pi 3
- IMST iC880A - http://webshop.imst.de/ic880a-spi-lorawan-concentrator-868mhz.html
- Pi to iC880A connector board
- Metal, waterproof, outdoor enclosure
- UFL to N type cable
- Lightning arrestor
- 4dB collinear antenna
- N to N antenna cable, LMR400
- Outdoor, UV stabilized ethernet cable
- Power-over-ethernet injector
- Power-over-ethernet extractor for Raspberry Pi
- M2.5 nuts and bolts to fasten the Electronics inside the enclosure.
- Female header strips for the connector board.
The software that runs on the Pi is based on the steps provided at https://github.com/jpmeijers/ttn-resin-gateway-rpi which makes use of Resin.io
