Gateway without RF frontend

Hi all,

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?

THX
Cheers
Detlef

Why route Pi only data via TTN? Why not send it directly to your data store?

1 Like

You want to use the TTN backend to process arbitary data ?

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
4 Likes