Hi all
I’ve got back into LoraWAN after a few years (work and all)-and with the lockdown here in the UK, and Xmas, seems the perfect opportunity to kick on
I have 2 gateways, both based on Raspberry Pi’s, using the Uptronics HAT-single channel, but I’m starting small-I also have a node, again a Pi, with the Dragino Lora/GPS HAT-simply broadcasting the GPS co-ordinates.All are working on the TTN console (I had a lot of help from the community a few years back)
I’d now like to build a not for profit small network in the local town, using off the shelf sensors, just to see what info I can get back, the range of the radios, info on water levels etc.
Here’s my question-how best to manage and visualise this? Would I use the likes of AWS IoT-or is that OTT. Or do I try something like this?
I come from an IP background, strong in monitoring-and I’d like something where I can easily see the health, status and info on both the gateways and end sensors-happy to try and build my own, or have it hosted by someone else (but not too expensive!)
Ideas welcome please
Cheers
For how you develop things in your community, the simplest thing is to have a gateway & a couple or three devices, get the data published in as simple a format as possible, get some interest going and then see how it evolves. You may end up with an A level CS student building a ML system on Azure or a retiree coding HTML or anything really, just provide a simple way to get to the data. And then others will take some interest in devices for all the use cases.
And, of course, setup a TTN Community for your area.
Sadly these are not gateways, they are what we call Single Channel Packet Forwarders that are not LoRaWAN compliant and are hugely detrimental to the TTN network so we’d ask that you disconnect them immediately.
With a Pi you could look at adding a Pi-Supply RAK Hat or a RAK only Hat to build a full 8 channel gateway or look at a number of low cost gateways.
Thanks
Apart from the telling off, I don’t think I got an answer to my question-as far as I can see from the logs, there s very little activity from end devices in the local area so I don’t think I’m taking down the TTN network in the West of Scotland
So if we concentrate on the positives of what I’m trying to do (and the single channel boards were to simply try out the concept), and I shell out a couple of hundred pounds for RAK HAT’s, what monitoring solution would you advise on?
We end up saying exactly the same every day if you search the forum - and if there is ANY activity on TTN in your area, then you may well be disrupting uplinks for some of the devices and almost certainly downlinks. TTN is a community network, it would be remiss of us to not explain the ramifications to those that have setup such systems.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of monitoring solutions. The common integrations built in to TTN would be a good starting point but it all depends on what your preferences are for building such things & how you want your output to look: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/applications/integrations.html
I personally like to get my hands on the raw data as fast as possible using HTTP Integration to a simple web server script or run an MQTT python script, get it in to a database and then it can be relayed on, processed & analysed with a variety of tools. You may prefer some drag & drop coding with Node-RED. Or put it straight in to a dashboard like Cayenne. Or use IFTTT.
For monitoring of your whole infrastructure, I’d have a canary device - something simple in reasonably close proximity to a gateway that can uplink every 15 minutes. Then with something like IFTTT or your own code, you can be alerted if nothing is heard for 20 minutes and you get a way of tracing the whole chain from gateway to your back end as you’ll know what to look for at each step along the way.
