Greetings TTN colleagues from Washington DC. I just ordered a TTIG from Allied Electronics and thank you for providing the link/discussions in the TTIG message thread. While I know it will be several weeks before my unit arrives, I wanted to get clarification from the community that it is possible for a smart phone app to trigger the my TTIG to issue a LoRa signal to my sensor. I know the reverse pathway is the most common IoT approach (ie sensor to gateway to app) but I haven’t seen any references to using a cell phone app to issue a command directly to the sensor.
As always, I appreciate your constructive comments.
3Dtj
not related to TTIG imho… but in general, if you create an application that works on your smartphone and connects to TTN… why not (phones don’t transmit Lora signals directly and you need the TTN backend or a private server)
see APPLICATIONS
and you have to look at class C nodes… ‘always’ ON nodes . that is possible with the just released V3 stack
Making the phone issue a request to the network servers is relatively straightforward, and the network servers can delegate that to an appropriate gateway, yours if it is closest.
The challenge is more that (unless very recently changed) TTN only supports Class A nodes, which operate under a scheme where they can only receive downlinks as direct, immediate replies to their uplinks. So essentially your node can only receive downlink messages by periodically sending an uplink to poll for them, and there are both practical and policy limits on how often you can poll. Can your application tolerate many minutes of latency in downlinks? If not, this is probably not the solution you want.
There are other ways (not TTN, or not even LoRaWan) to use LoRa radio technology which might fit better into your application, and potentially quite different technologies (SMS paging replacements, etc) that might be the best fit, but those aren’t really on topic here.