The hard RAK831 cafe part 1

Gateways RAK Gateways
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Hi Everyone,

Looks like RAK wireless is hosting a contest for projects based on RAK831 board over at Hackster.io here https://www.hackster.io/rak-wireless/announcing-rak-iot-project-contest-6a690b.

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source : https://twitter.com/narioINC

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That one looks super neat, but the guy doing it said the device has a ā€˜half duplex spi issueā€™, which makes me wonder if itā€™s worth it at all, in the end, RPi Zero is even cheaper and proven to work.

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which board are you talking about re spi issues?

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LinkIt board

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Talking about OpenWRT to drive concentrator is a really great idea.

I could try with $9 Onion Omega 2, may be Iā€™ll give it a try with my designed
Power Shield favorited on june 2-bullet-tuesday :wink:

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@Charles: @h0l0gram was trying out the Omega 2 recently, but having troubles with an spi bug on it. Maybe you can team up to try and find a workaroundā€¦

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@Charles @gonzalo I cross-compiled the poly packet forwarder and tried to run it on the Omega2. The PPF was ā€œunable to start the concentratorā€ because of issues with SPI.
I analyzed the data on SPI dev and can confirm that the first bit is low (instead of high) under certain circumstances.

Omega2 is afaik mt7688 as well. And as such it is currently affected by the same SPI bug as the Linkit7688.
So the above patch could work too. But this requires that you build the whole LEDE/OpenWRT yourself.

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@h0l0gram
Thanks for the information, very interesting.
So if I understand, the problem it related to HW?
I can imagine you already tested to set SPI on custom pins like the onion doc permit with spi-tool ?

Another option could be test Onion SPI C Library but itā€™s a hard work since we need to modify LibLoraGW source code to talk with this SPI library (without any garante on success)

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Hi, can you confirm about RP-SMA connector?, RAKwireless sent me the datasheet of the antenna and there it says that it is SMA male.

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My board has a connector with a pin and with thread on the outside of the connector. According to wikipedia (and my experience) that is a RP-SMA female connector (see figure 2 on the wikipedia page). Male SMA has a pin and the thread on the inside.

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some SMA connector pics/shops

@kersing
is it still running ? :wink:

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@narioinc89 @kersing
Hi guys, I also bought RAK831 board and iā€™m struggling with it.

i follow the tutorial https://github.com/Lora-net/packet_forwarder/wiki/Use-with-Raspberry-Pi
which use semtech packet forwarder and HAL.

but when i execute lora_pkt_forward, i got this resultā€¦
can anyone give me an advice? :wink:

Also, powering 5V from RPI to RAK831 cannot be a problem right?..

ps. i want to use local network sever, not ttn, for research.

best regardsā€¦

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and this one ā€¦ according to @kersing it works fine

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hi,

Could you try and post the output of test_loragw_spi and test_loragw_reg commands tools that is generated during the build process of the lora gateway HAL.

There is also a util_tx_test command that will just run and do some transmission testing
you can run it like so from a linux terminal:

$ ./util_txt_test -r 1257 -f 866.5

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@narioinc89

I found how to figure it out.!!
but in lora_gateway source, reset_lgw.sh script is not workingā€¦

then I reconnected 5v pin and GND pin of RAK831 several times , then itā€™s working.

do you know the problem?

and, is it possible to do communication tests among end-nodes and gateway without network server?

best regards.

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Hi you all,

Iā€™m new to LoRaWan and what a lot is there to read. Even so, I absolutely do not understand everything I read. Trying though!

So, after ā€œbuildingā€ a ESP8266/RFM95 single channel gateway, that did not work, and making a Raspberry/RFM95 single channel gateway (singel_chan_pkg_fwd) that does work I realize that a real TTN gateway is the way to go, providing a part of Almere Haven a TheThingsNetwork coveridge. So I ordered the RAK831 and in the mean time configuring a RPi for the RAK831.

My question to the community is: is there a ā€œbest practiceā€? Foremost: what software to install to make a ā€œconfigure once and never look at it again gatewayā€?

After that there is enough to learn and research for creating nodesā€¦ (I have bought some ESP8266 and RFM95 modules, but the RFM95ā€™s seem not to be the lora modules of choice. Any help in pointing to the right direction for that is also welcome).
Thanks in advance!

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Start with the TTN packet forwarder. The github contains all instructions for deploying and running a gateway unattended on a Raspberry Pi, which is pretty much the most common way people run TTN gateways for now;

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New toy arrives, play time!

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