Slowly more and more new gateways are being added to the Things Network, which is fantastic to see (also see http://ttnstatus.org/http://staging.thethingsnetwork.org/gatewaystatus/).
Since not all gateways are sending their location, it would be great if you could send an email to info@ttnstatus.org with the following information (when adding a new gateway):
The EUI of the gateway (something like ‘0000024B08060126’)
A descriptive name of the gateway (f.ex. ‘Deloitte’, or ‘John’s gateway in Utrecht’)
The location of the gateway (GPS coordinates if available + the name of the location (f.ex. Westerstraat Amsterdam))
The name and email address of the maintainer (optional)
Whether you want to receive a message in case your gateway goes down or shows other signs of bad health (optional)
If you’ve previously setup a gateway, which will no longer be active, let me know and I will remove it from the list.
Note that all of this is purely optional and for entertainment/curiosity purposes only!
I take it you’re maintaining ttnstatus.org? Any thoughts on the management of gateways? Is there any planning for building an admin interface/visualisations? Let me know if I can be of assistance.
TTNStatus is primarily meant to provide an overview of all currently active gateways and monitor their health.
What do you mean by ‘management of gateways’ and ‘admin interface’ ( interface to do what?)?
Of course any additions in the line of gateway overview/monitoring will be most welcome, as well as your help.
I’m just not sure what exactly you are referring to
Firstly an open question really - and one based more on my ignorance of how LoRa and gateways will work more than anything else. A LoRa device will connect to a gateway but what happens when moving between gateways - is there any management/handoff or are the devices and gateways left to work it out for themselves?
Secondly - if there is administration required then some form of control/monitoring of this activity would be good. What, if any, are thoughts there?
Thirdly is more about visualisation - what could we add perhaps in the way of maps/data flows/control flows? i.e. not only montoring of gateway health but also traffic to give performance and potential troubleshooting information and clearer idea of what is going where and when.
So yeah, quite a lot really (!) but seeing as I have a little bit of time now I’d like to start helping out if I can so these are the questions that float to the top.
Regarding your question about handoff: I’m not really sure, I haven’t been really involved in those technical details, but I’m assuming there is a way to deal with nodes sending to multiple gateways. Maybe somebody else can chime in?
Your suggestion about monitoring traffic is an interesting one. Currently, the gateway status monitor only looks at status update packets sent by the gateway (i.e not at packets sent by nodes f.ex.)
To be honest, I think there’s really not a lot of node data incoming at the moment.
In time I think it would be very interesting to also look at node data, for example we could use it to get an idea about the range of each gateway when nodes start to send their GPS coordinaties.
Right now my main focus is on getting some more info on the gateways that are presently active.
Maybe you would like to help think about how we can improve the available information so that we can get a better overview of what is happening where?
The GPS coordinates are transmitted by the gateway status json, so it would be unnecessary work to add them manually. Yes, i know not all gateways have GPS on board, but if you run the poly_packet_forwarder, u can enter “fake” coordinates (make sure you activate GPS and fake_gps in the configuration).
Further, we will extending the json information shortly so you can add “informal information” like ‘location’ and others.
Keep tuned to the github
Me and Thomas discussed it and decided that we will add these three fields:
desc: a general description of the gateway, max 64 chars
mail: should contain the email of the gateway operator, max 32 chars,
pfrm: contains the gateway platform, so Kerlink, Lorank, MultiTech etc, max 32 chars.
I will add these to the forwarders in the coming days, together with some bug fixes.
Just a side note, wouldn’t 32 chars for an email be too few for some corporate addresses (e.g. name.surname kind of email user) and/or long domain names? I mean, my corporate address at the regional government is 35 chars long
I will think about it. I ran an analysis on my contact list (approx. 700 emails) and less than 1% did not fit in. We must realise that any maximum will be too short for some people, and that this file is send every 30 sec from every gateway. The question is not, will it fit every possible email address out there, but more will anyone be able to supply a contact address that fits. Usually that is a lot easier. But adding a few chars would not be that bad of course.
Just wondering if a task like this could not be done by members of this community, so you can concentrate on higher prio tasks. OpenOffice/LibreOffice have been quite successful with leaving small tasks to the community. These says we do have Github which makes it even better manageable.
Just my 2cts (Unfortunately I can not volunteer since I am not a coder)
@devlaam Although my Kerlinks have a GPS, I’ve activated fake_gps = true and inserted ref_latitude, ref_longitude and ref_altitude, but I see no location in ttnstatus. You mention you need to activate GPS too, in my global config I have “gps_tty_path”: “/dev/nmea”. Is there anything else I need to do?
@Arjan what is the eui? Sometimes people send me their info, but the gateway does not yet show up through the api/ttnstatus and I can’t add a description. In that case I wait a week or so and try again.
@Jorma it seems you found it already, AA555A00080605A2 is now having a description
The number two is AA555A0008060249, please list it as #2. Can you list them as “TTN Flevoland, Voiceworks #1” and “TTN Flevoland, Voiceworks #2” ?
