Hey all. Last year I installed my RPi with a RAK833 USB concentrator. It has been happily receiving packets for TTN since… until today. SD card seems corrupt and had to be replaced.
I am now trying to reinstall the gateway and get it back on TTN. However, RAK seems to have taken the required repository offline (https://github.com/RAKWireless/RAK833-LoRaGateway-RPi-TTN.git), so the build fails.Little luck with the alternative repos either as communication with the RAK833 fails (which is connected to USB using a Mini PCIe to USB board)
I have been scouring this forum and the internet, but at this point I am somewhat lost to be honest. My technical knowledge obviously falls short and don’t know where to start to get my gateway back online.
Has the repo been superseded?
Should I now try and get my hands on a RPI hat that enables me to use SPI (instead of USB) as support for USB has been dropped from the libraries (something I read as well)?
I hope someone can point me in the right direction.
Yes, they’re deprecating decent products in favor of inferior new ones. And seemingly pushing new code repos, too.
With the caution that barebones USB concentrators (ie, FT2232 rather than an MCU as in the pico GW design) have issues, mostly what you need is either an old version of the LoRa HAL that still has USB, or a current version that someone’s stuck the USB support back into.
The repo you’re not managing to find is more of a meta-repo that handles the installation - the actual work is done by the lora_gateway HAL and the packet fowarder repo, for which you can probably use either RAK’s or Semtech’s, albeit possibly with some slight compatibility issues.
Since your pi has SPI you might consider switching to that mode, though you’d need to tap out the SPI signals at the base of the mPCIE connector, and ground pin 17 to put the RAK833 in SPI mode.
Thanks for this link! Something to work on for today.
Regardless whether I get the GW up with this repo, I think it’s definitely worth getting myself a SPI hat for the RAK833. At some point in time the person forking and adding the USB stack will get tired of it
I’m tempted to point out that there’s a degree of “if it ain’t broke” involved - ie, if this time around you archive all the pieces yourself, it may not matter (at least for a couple of years) if the world moves on without you. And fortunately the limitations of a USB concentrator seems to be of the sort that reduce its contribution to the network, rather than the sort which “mislead” the network into making bad choices.
That said, I would encourage switching to SPI. The RAK833 operated via SPI is, as far as I’ve been able to tell, a first-class solution.
Buying a “hat” is certainly an option, and probably the best one.
I’ve had some temporary success in simply soldering wires to the base of the mPCIE connector on a mPCIe modem hold board (after replacing the overvoltage regulator with a 3v3 one!) and bringing those over to the pi (being careful to keep things short). But in fairness, I had a binocular microscope to work under, it would be quite a bit more challenging to do it with eyes alone, or even do it by eye and then inspect under a 10x jeweler’s loupe.
I would also go for a ready made Pi hat. It should just work, without having to fiddle with wires or being limited to older software that still includes USB support.
(No experience with RAK833 myself, but the Pi Hat experience should be similar to RAK831.)
Gateway is back online and receiving messages.
Thanks all!
Next step will be selecting a Pi hat for the RAK833 and get rid of the need for USB support. Currently have me eye on the hat created by Pi Supply. Suggestion for better alternatives are welcome.
