I successfully set up a gateway with a raspi3 and an ic880a. I successfully programmed a T-beam as a node. I successfully registered the gateway and the node at ttn. I see the gateway and the node payload on my console and I can download the data from ttn.
Is it possible to run the raspi3 as gateway without the ic880A or any other radio frequency frontend? I want to upload only raspi3 intrinsic data to ttn, i.e. test data or temperatures. Are there other projects which run a ttn gateway on an arbitrry platform without an RF frontend?
Theoretically this can be done if you write the software yourself, however TTN is not meant to handle data from none LoRaWAN sources. As suggested a direct connection to your data store (or via your own MQTT broker) would be the appropriate solution.
We get a variation of this question about once a month, and it always comes down to the same thing:
Don’t do it.
Don’t needlessly route your non-LoRaWAN traffic through TTN’s shared LoRaWAN infrastructure.
Don’t waste inordinate effort turning something that isn’t LoRaWAN into fake LoRaWAN messages
Don’t waste more effort making a program for the pi that pretends it is a gateway when it’s really just feeding fake messages
Don’t pointlessly put this load on the TTN servers
Don’t uselessly suffer downtime when the TTN servers fail for a path that everyone would benefit from having remain entirely within your own infrastructure
Don’t pointlessly constrain your non-LoRaWAN data to the extreme size and rate limitations of LoRaWAN
But
Do build your data infrastructure in such a way that it can accept feeds from a diverse variety of sources