Would absolutely agree. Bugs in code you have access to get fixed, so once a project is mature, the remaining bugs are in the propriety parts you can’t fix.
I haven’t tried it, but my impression is that the Dragino door sensor isn’t really much different from their development kit, eg, you can make your own firmware for it using the development kit sources, only that is not officially supported.
The Heltech CubeCell AB-01 dropped in price the past weeks now around €10.
Indeed, and you can change the underlying LoRaWan stack. That said, Heltic is being silly with their $uper$ectret bootloader and apparently disabling the SWD pins by promptly putting them in some other mode. It would be nice not to have to use the hardware under the absurdities of Arduino. Nor is that doing them any good as it’s quite easy to dump the information they’re trying to “protect” from Arduino code.
Jac, I’ve odrdered this Heltec ones cause I thought it was open and compatible.
From your comment I am thinking i was wrong in recomending them or even buying it myself. These incorrect settings you reffer to… can they be fixed or have I just tossed money down the drain?
Ever heard of “the guy with the Swiss accent” Andreas Spiess? His review of this board didn’t mention anthing about needing a special license to use them or incorrect default settings.
I though they would compatible with the arduino IDE and without any code on them.
The hardware you ordered is Arduino IDE compatible and can be programmed without having to worry about the SWD pins with a serial connection. The hardware should be programmed with the magic license required for Arduino usage if it is genuine Heltec hardware. (They want to protect their investment and I think they are going about it the wrong way but being Chinese they probably know what lengths copy cats go to to sell comparable hardware cheaper)
The wrong settings referred to are easily fixed when creating your own LoRaWAN program. Just make sure to select unconfirmed messages in the settings before compiling.
Our issue with the hardware is that it is presented as being open but to to able to use it you rely on a binary blob for Arduino compatibility and the development environment available for it defaults to the wrong settings.
A deal breaker? Not necessarily as long as you are aware of these limitations and take into account it is not as open and transparent as the advertising suggests.
SWD pins are used for low level programming and debugging when no bootloader is available,
In particular, they’d be very helpful to use it in a professional non-Arduino development flow.
In theory it’s probably possible to do enough archeology on their Arduino BSP (which is open source) to figure out how to talk to their bootloader, but…
Between the Heltec only working under Arduino, and some of the RAK stuff being an online compiler or figure it out from scratch, it’s sad that a lot of these companies seem to only be targeting hobby/proof of concept situations, and not professional deployments.
I wonder @Jonthan if you’d like to tell us what your accent is. Andreas has a Swiss accent because he’s Swiss. His name would have been sufficient.
Andreas has a lot of experience and may not have noticed that some things wouldn’t be so simple for a beginner. I haven’t watched his video on this product, did he use Arduino or the original SDK?
A brief 10 second search of the forum would reveal that there are plenty of fans of the Heltec range, indeed I have several of their modules, but also there are a fair few support issues raised.
If you want to go DIY then the Adafruit Feather M0 with RFM95 is, well, an Adafruit offering with all the support infrastructure that comes with their products and is a primary supported board for the MCCI LMiC LoRaWAN stack, the best regarded implementation for Arduino. Even that comes with a range of support issues but mostly are related to RTFM or knowledge related to bytes in the payload, which is documented in the TTN docs, so that’s an RTFM issue too.
@descartes That’s how Andreas introduces every video… it is a direct quote and not some sort of slight against him. I have watched pretty much every video he ever put out, big fan.
He used arduino ide in the video and far as I can see it is an easy peasy install to get it running, even for a beginner. I heve been browsing their forums over at Heltec though and I see their engineers in the threads promissing to fix some library bugs that folks have pointed out to them.
I’ve done the diy route, soldering RFM modules onto the break out PCBs ment for the ESP8266 and using level shifters to put it on a 5v arduino. That was a couple years ago though, thankfully we dont have to resort to that anymore. I have been waiting for affordable modules with wifi and solar so I can geek out on my bees and they are starting to show up more and more.