Being a thicked skin quasi-northerner, it’s not any one individual I’m concerned about, it’s the collective and I’d rather not read about someone thinking they can build themselves a radio tracker and coming a cropper off the back of any one thread positing some ideas.
As for the community aspects, the v2 servers are suffering because some people have overloaded them with connections, there is a post about it from a senior TTI engineer Friday, consequently some functionality that is rather useful to migration has been disabled. So anyone hoping to “hit” as you so frequently say, the world wide free-to-use servers that some communities rely on for flood warnings and other useful stuff are going to get some encouragement to re-design their application.
So please don’t try to “push the network” until you understand the details of what you are pushing and how it may have consequences that make others uncomfortable.
50ms is enough time to transmit 3 bytes, which if you send some cunningly crafted delta’s could just about fit a geolocation in - but even then you’d need to be close to a gateway to get the DR to 5 and you’d be limited to 583 uplinks in 24 hours on TTN.
This may feel like nitpicking on the semantics of what you are typing, but the juxtaposition of your choice of words and the data storage query rate point towards the wrong end of the use spectrum for this community resource.
To understand uplink limits, this is a very useful calculator, you should bear in mind that with longer distances you will have to find a way to automagically set the DR lower with the consequential impact on transmission frequency:
https://avbentem.github.io/airtime-calculator/ttn/eu868/25
And for downlinks, it’s 10 a day per device but if you are doing much more than 1 a week there may be something wrong with your use of LoRaWAN - gateways are stone deaf whilst transmitting so any uplinks are lost so the best designs are the ones that do not rely on downlinks to be delivered in a timely fashion.
Node-RED is a thing in some circles of data presentation - some systems seem to clump together - so Node-RED to InfluxDB to Granfana (dashboard) is a solution set that’s in common use.
The very nicest integration to use, as advised by the aforementioned senior engineer, is web hooks which are so stupidly simple that they don’t even need configuring in the code I’ve supplied in the repro above but can produce output that can be copied & pasted in to Excel once it’s up & running. I’m not really in to the bigger iron stuff (AWS, Azure, GCP), I tend to get younger minds with more patience to make me one, but all of them have ‘serverless’ endpoints that can stuff the data in to any one of a bewildering range of databases which you can then BigData all over the place and draw charts and sometimes, maybe, some conclusions.
It is exciting tech, I have multiple back burner projects of all types & sizes littering my office/workshop, but it’s also got lots of moving parts that take time for the understanding to bake in. Just getting a device sending a number (not Hello World, we don’t transmit text here) and fishing it out the other end is a big milestone. Adding in a GPS & making the payload compact is a big step up. Creating a decent integration that then displays the GPS co-ordinates is another. Adding in Google Maps or some such gets a working version. With that sort of progression you’ll start to see the wrinkles, foibles & gotchas and have a much more in-depth understanding of it all.
Go and get a TTGO T-Beam 868MHz LoRa with GPS from Amazon, a gateway (highly recommended for when you want to debug your own devices, it lets you see what’s actually going on), a TTIG is OK unless you want to fiddle with it, then come back & search for low cost gateway recommendations and use LMIC-node for your firmware.