I am really new to the world of IoT. Since I live on a farm, my devices are a bit furter spread than the wifi. I recently baught some LoRa devices to play arround.
Pico-Lora sx1262 868
and sx1262 868 LoRa Hat
The plan was to connect them point to point. I failed miserably. I might have to go a step further and join the hings Network.
I am considering to buy one of these:
RAK5146 PiHAT Kit for LoRaWAN
There is a nice tutorial available how to set it up as a gateway using a raspberry and it is quite cheap. Since I already struggle with the setup and all the coding I would really like to know ahead if it is really possible to get it to work.
Does this work well together with the enddevices I already have?
Does anyone allready have experience what range I might get with this setup?
Coding the SX1262 Pi HAT has challenges due to timing issues with Linux and generally not recommended.
LoRaWAN is a well defined standard, the interoperability is relatively assured and the hardware you’ve listed with the appropriate software like RadioLib will enable you to use them.
You may find it simpler to buy already built devices. Once you have LoRaWAN 101 under your belt, then you can revisit making your own.
As for range, the length of this piece of string is anywhere between zero (as in no range at all) to several hundreds of km’s as forum search for ‘range’ will show. 868MHz is line of sight radio - if two ground based antennas can see each other, in general you are good with LoRaWAN as range is LoRa (Long Range) is its forte. Forum search will provide you with more insight.
@jtwk not only device timing issues; can you advise your plans for Intenet backhaul from your GW(s) at the farm, conventional wired telecoms or even 3/4/5G cellular usually ok but if as I suspect you may be considering Starlink you need to be sure of link stability and particularly latency. Haven’t any personal experience (yet!) with Mr Musk’s offering but would be interested to hear users evaluation of latency and any impact on LoRaWAN network window timings (and time-outs)!
I will look for a prebuilt gateway than. It is time for something to work…
I was just studying the available versions of radiolib for micropython. What the ones I found lack is some sort of join() function to connect to the ttn application. I get the feeling they are more for point to point connections. Won’t I get arround using C in order to properly us LoRa anyway? Or am I missing something?
Yes - you are right. Starlink is the only real option for us. Since we gotthe dish instaled we are finally connected properly. The srability is surprising but there is no consistency when it comes to latency <99ms is not always true. Experience in the combination with LoRa I can’t yet provide.
Interested to see how you get on then Cellular can sometimes be >100ms even >250ms and if gets too big then message timing can mess up, but usually ok. Let us know what you see. Also does Starlink pass UDP traffic or block any ports or is it .e.g TCP/IP only? Etc. do your research 1st as answer to that may dictate type of LW GW you use, or at the very least what type/version of a packet forwarder option you can deploy on a given GW (Classic SMTC UDP, Polypkt, MpPF, Basic-Station etc.).
Will be interesting to see if other users already running on Starlink connectivity? LoRa/LoRaWAN based specific sat options exist/starting to emerge which may be another option once they get enough birds in the air (ok vacuum!) to provide full coverage…
Cellular can sometimes be >100ms even >250ms and if gets too big then message timing can mess up, but usually ok. Let us know what you see. Also does Starlink pass UDP traffic or block any ports or is it .e.g TCP/IP only? Etc. do your research 1st as answer to that may dictate type of LW GW you use, or at the very least what type/version of a packet forwarder option you can deploy on a given GW (Classic SMTC UDP, Polypkt, MpPF, Basic-Station etc.).