Long range radio Pager project

End Devices (Nodes)
17

So things like:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Aprs-Tnc-Ant51-Tracker-Net-Digipeater-Weather-Station-With-Bluetooth-Ttl-8-15V-I-/302300017554?hash=item46627c3392:g:pdIAAOSw44BYI0gn

http://www.byonics.com/tinytrak/

?

Doesn’t really cut it price wise, IMO. I mean, how do I configure things like this into a simple single sealed low-maintenance box, with no ongoing costs, that can run off a small solar panel without the need for a large 12 volt lead acid battery? The APRS stuff needs a radio, and an antenna, and it all has to be turned on for it to work. I want something that turns itself on.

I am looking at a less pro home made thing like a esp-8266 or similar Ardunio, with an RFM-95, some sensors, and a $20 GPS. Total cost <$100 Australian for the electronics. The wifi facilitates upgrades and bug fixes without opening up the sealed weatherproof box. The finished product would have nothing but a few buttons and a couple of lights. There would be a power off button, but motion would activate it on automatically, and it would remain on until the power-off button was hit.

Also, we have remote gates, pumps, tanks, and livestock, all which could be IOT enabled. Presently, it takes a lot of walking or driving to check on these things.

A single or double gateway setup would enable a future of very low cost home made devices, at what appears to be a lower price point than the APRS system - where a radio would be needed for each device. I have a rough fantasy of as many as 50 devices (tractor being one) to be installed over a 5-10 year period. I have given it a little thought, and believe that leveraging open source software with budget hardware could result in sealed boxes running off solar panels with few to no controls - boxes that just ‘work’.

Lorawan seems to fit the bill, especially as a downlink from the internet via a gateway could allow a light to come on to confirm a series of SMSs had been sent, in the case of the tractor.

https://fred.sensetecnic.com/
Tall plan is $10 a month, and using node red to help diagnose, wire and manage the gateways and devices and messaging seems like a good option.

Getting back to the original post, I still think the pager is a device that I could borrow code from, or at least study, in a long term way.

18

Yes. But PGP is possible, Blockchain also. And relatively immune to “agencies” requests to CUT the GSM network for any reason :slight_smile: Let’s be paranoïd :slight_smile: Open source allows the polymorphism in the crypto methods, network architecture reorganisation. Not the GSM standards. They are PROS and CONS. I’m just discovering , I have no answers yet

19

so you want to run your business with home made stuff hacked together from China parts and on a breadboard… interesting :grin:

a keyboard attached to a ‘node’ for sending txt messages ? no… that’s a very bad use case imho and I don’t think TTN will be very happy (not that I think this idea will ever get to a working prototype)

21

sorry but I responded to Xenek.

No I fully understand that its fun to think about how to get things to work (he… its my hobby too) but some ideas are a waste off time… and this is an example imho , but don’t listen to me :wink:

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22

still fighting to find a professionnal quality LCD display (dot matrix). Looks like it not that easy.
sound like pagers factory have made their own :frowning:

23

for a simple 'pager, that is pager A push a button, a digit is transmitted and received (lets forget how) by pager B, gives a sound and depending on the digit received it displays ’ 1= call mom 2=call dad 3=dinners ready ’ ect., you can do with a very small bright i2c oled

25

what size is that ?

and if you want to control a little menu with your thumb :wink:

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I can see it working to track farm equipment, gates etc but I’d never trust the safety of a family member to LoRaWAN, just too many - fast changing - parts to go wrong. More so with some rickety cheap setup with gateways hanging at the end of microwave links.

I’d consider APRS if amateur radio license was an option, a GPS enabled transmitter is less than $100 https://www.sainsonic.com/ap510-aprs-tracker-vhf-with-gps-bluetooth-thermometer-tf-card-support-aprsdroid.html

or more likely go for Iridium ($15/month world coverage)

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29

tnx . it is TFT … no LCD … power consumption is big

30

Where can we find the blue pcb one ?
I have the up left one, but too small for most bin fingered people

31

have to find it in my archives somewhere.
in fact the wheel is a rotary encoder + if you push a switch, very handy (I think it was expensive :sweat: )

found it

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Just FYI, in case it’s not on your list already:

I count 8 lines of 20 characters. Assuming LoRaWAN rather than plain LoRa, SF12 allows for 51 bytes. This is roughly about a third of the number of characters, giving you a character set of about 80 glyphs. For English, that might suffice…?

(It would need 2.8 seconds air time on SF12.)

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34

I found a good quality one

http://www.chip45.com/products/dogm128w-6_lcd_display_modul_grafik_128x64_pixel_seriell_spi.php

35

And you will connect your gateway to the internet how?

Really, you’re just moving the issue. The best and imo only way to provide resilience against ‘external influence’ is plausible deniability in the form of end-to-end encryption. You can do that over any network medium. Shifting the last mile from cellular to LoraWAN will not change anything, because you will still have to rely on network mediums that can’t be trusted to connect your gateways to the internet, to connect your server to the internet etc. If the government wants your pager down, they’ll just send a warrant to the ISP of your gateway or server.

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36

Encryption alone won’t help much in the way of resilience if the ‘external influence’ can just cut your backbone network access so I think alternative network mediums are still worth investigating.

But yes maybe LoRaWAN isn’t ideal because of the coordinated network server requirement. Maybe the P2P LoRa as @ccadic was saying before.

37

The best , is probably to experiment and see.
I’ll try. a P2P concept is oviously needed. With transcoder GW modules to interconnect to existing system.
The immunity to External Influence is not the main goal anyway, it is only a part of the project

38

_there is a tool named startdog_V43 to get an idea how that (expensive with backpanel!) display looks.

US $7.44 - http://www.ebay.com/itm/302285955198? :wink:

(just bought one myself to test for another project)

39

Should maybe start some crowd funded projects to detect when the NSA start experimenting on cracking the home gateways. Oh wait… I thought one of the existing ttn meetups in Eindhoven was going to talk about some hack detection software. Maybe inspired by this very threat :slight_smile:

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