I ask for help to find if it exists, a Gateway board that i could use by USB and move easely with my laptop, so that my laptop, or my desktop would run packet forwarder and gateway software, using the RF board connected to its usb port.
All i see is autonomous system running on top of Raspberry or Microcontroller, using gpio, but i cannot find a good board that i can just plug with USB on my linux computer and start to dev with it.
May be i misunderstood something, or i lake common knowledge of electronics which leads me to miss something in the big picture, that’s why i ask some help here !
Long story short if you can’t follow the long discussion. PC’s does not have SPI interface. PI has, or other non-PC products (check links in discussion)
USB concentrator It’s good solution probably only for testing. Range is very limited (300m), since it’s indoors. I have some semi-outdoors ideas (one is to use active usb extrension cable!) but not tried yet.
For extra money you can buy mikrotik, or PI (4 is overkill) + with ic880a. I met some guy in my local community and it has 2 years of reliability without any care.
I had the wrong impression that n-fuse card (I bought it) that is both SPI and USB / UART cabaple, but it’s only USB / UART. It seems reliable to all my tests. It’s on 24/7. Whenever I check, it works. I don’t like the high temperature. I precautionary installed a DIY fan. It’s working over a 7 port usb hub. For testing it’s ok. But if you want to go outdoors (one-way for serious range), better to check other SPI solutions. I have zero traffic in my area, so I can’t comment on reliability over heavy traffic.
I was able to contribute to TinyLoRa so it’s a win situation for me till now. BUT, only for testing / developing. If you want to contribute to community, just spend the extra money for outdoor concentrator.
I am planning to buy Mikrotik lora kit or pi + ic880a, I suggest the same or similar embedded solutions.
If you want to experiment you can tryn-fuse usb and in future a pi hat with a pi. I don’t know if it’s a reliable solution, since you will connect USB to PI and not SPI to PI.
Forget single / dual channel ‘concentrators’ go for the real thing.
To be clear, your USB gateway has limited range because you put it indoors.
But as a design category USB gateways (conventional ones, without an on-board MCU) have difficult with busy networks (and so are deprecated from software support), not with range.
My target is to have handy device on wich i can dev.
I already have a RAK gateway on top of raspberry, running full time for my town, but i want to enter the code, test develop, therefore i need something i can plug to my laptop, and provide hardware link while my laptop will run the code i develop.
A little usb module with 300m range is far from enough, as far as i wont get up my sit and going to run away with my lora node to test gateway code.
So i dont look for full time grade gateway, but device which can easely be put on my backpack, with my laptop and when i have time, i can code. (lunch break at work for exemple).
I have an hackrf board, and it’s easy to carry and deploy. So i was targeting something alike for LORA
A little usb module with 300m range is far from enough, as far as i wont get up my sit and going to run away with my lora node to test gateway code.
Again, while FTDI-based USB solutions have issues, range is not one of them. That was entirely due to the other poster’s install location.
So i dont look for full time grade gateway, but device which can easely be put on my backpack, with my laptop and when i have time, i can code. (lunch break at work for exemple).
Another option to consider would be leaving the gateway in a good location, and accessing it remotely. Even if I’m in the same room as one of my development gateways, I generally only connect to it with a serial cable when I’m working on basic OS setup or the scripts that enable remote access, otherwise I use the remote access to do work on the gateway. I’ll do trivial edits on the gateway, for more complex ones I edit it elsewhere and transfer it over. And while one can cross compile for the more capable compute platforms (pi, orangepi, etc) it doesn’t take that long to build on the device.
One of the other things about leaving a gateway in a given location is you can leave the nodes it interacts with in fixed locations, too. Some of my test nodes sit on their own remotely accessible pi supervisors - the pi has a copy of openocd and can reflash the node via a connection of chosen GPIOs to the node’s SWD pins, and the pi collects the node’s serial debug log, which I can either watch live or search back through. I usually have a node and SWD adapter with me, but often it’s faster to deploy to several in fixed installations and record how they interact with the network, plus then I don’t end up buried in cables.
But if you really want something portable, a concentrator board and a raspberry pi (or better yet something like an OrangePi model with eMMc) can be put in a small box. I’d avoid the pi zero as its interfaces are just too limited, in theory the gateway only needs SPI but if you wanted something like a GPS you could find yourself without a console serial port or needing to add a hub. And if you wanted to actually be a useful gateway you probably want wired Ethernet (or LTE) rather than wifi.
USB interface without latency problems of former FTDI US gateways.
About 100€, great travel gateway.
The packet forwarder is already compiled for Windows.
For the n-fuse USB LoRaWAN Gateway (LoRa mPCI-E card with USB-Adapter), there is also a Windows Software available with GUI that you can download from the product page.
