How do you mean? I can buy PIC32MZ’s at €8 for single quantities at my premier distributor 
. Imo this opens a lot of potential for homebrew gateway boards integrating RF and control logic on one PCB.
A complete PIC32MZ devboard with integrated Ethernet, USB, SPI, UART, micro SD and OLED display goes for €25 btw, which is still €10 cheaper than a regular RasPi.
[quote=“wienkegiezeman, post:17, topic:6598, full:true”]We have not yet found time to decide on what open source license we will use. We need to find one that helps in contributing to our common goals and mission and also offset the large investment that has been done by us. Maybe if somebody has some ideas already, I would love to see them in Is The Things Gateway open source?
[/quote]
Wienke
Maybe you can first elaborate a bit on this, and maybe how the E14 partnership works exactly? Because it was my understanding that the Kickstarter provided the funds to develop and bring the gateway, software and node to the backers, and that the margins on the later sales would provide a sustainable way to bring it to the general public. But now it seems additional investments were needed, and this could create some constraints on earlier promises?
You can get Raspberry Pi’s Zero W for €12 in quantity now, and you can get even cheaper with AllWinner designs. If you must have an Ethernet port the Pi 2 Model B sells for €25 or get the NanoPi M1 for €8. *
Also you get full Linux with these, not some cut down Microchip proprietary “Harmony” stuff.
I’m not even saying ESP32 because that wasn’t generally available at the time the Kickstarter was launched, but that chip alone could replace 50%+ of the current gateway PCB area at 1/10 the cost - and it runs an open source FreeRTOS build.
So I’d add that PIC32MZ and Harmony environment choice don’t make sense to me both in price and openness.
( * the AllWinner H3 SoC is just $2.50 from my premier China suppliers )
Why is it that we didn’t see a WORKING multichannel DIY gateway, complete with PCB and firmware … it’s maybe not that easy ?
Yes and I know that some info is under NDA… but still 
" But still"… well since you get Semtech lawyers on you for even posting(!) the SX1301 data sheet it is challenging to have an open source project around it. I know some underground projects in places like Sons… but I doubt you’d see those around here.
Also Semtech only offers their reference design to licensees of the technology, again a major $$$ hurdle for a hobbyist project - and I’m sure that will come with an NDA too.
But Microchip did slip full schematics for their LoRaWAN gateway:
as you know once you link the SX1301 over SPI to a Linux box the firmware can be just Semtech’s open source tools
The RasPi is not intended to use in a product. You can, you are allowed, but they can’t guarantee long time availability and stuff.
“In addition, the Broadcom bootloader license3 explicitly states that its redistribution in binary form is only permitted if it will ‘only be used for the purposes of developing for, running or using a Raspberry Pi device.’” - see: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/34035/can-i-use-raspberry-pi-in-commercial-production and https://books.google.ch/books?id=ro0gCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=raspberry+pi+broadcom+bootloader+license&source=bl&ots=0Sc1gVQtw0&sig=qE5PY1YTnNaZ_u9Bevf4Z-pgXpY&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=raspberry%20pi%20broadcom%20bootloader%20license&f=false
Plus component prices are some kind of dark arts, I’m totally sure they have another price than you.
BTW: the most expensive PIC32MZ is around 14 $ for one, at digikey. 100 are around 12 per piece.
Indeed. When making a product, a race to the bottom pricing is seldom a good strategy. You also need to take the supply chain management and liabilities into account. RasPi or NanoPi are great for prototyping runs, but I wouldn’t want to order 1.000 of them to power my customers’ gateways around the world. I can however have 1.000 32bit MCU’s delivered to my doorstep tomorrow at a very interesting price, and be sure that they will operate perfectly according to specs. There is a reason the TTN gateway uses PIC32 and not a RasPi.
Having a open source packet forwarder that runs on a 32bit micro surely opens a lot of perspectives for affordable commercial gateways other than TTN.
To be fair, I’ve got my own picture attached. When I invested in November 2015 I was expecting the July 2016 date to be there or thereabouts. The whole point of investing was to get something ‘first to the market’. Now it’s days have past and it’s not exciting anymore - just continual delay emails coming out. At least I got a Nintendo Switch now to keep me company for the same price as this gateway where I’ve got nothing to show for it.
The amount of emails building up hope “we’re almost there” to then have “oh, found a firmware issue, it’ll be in a few months time” - it all wears thin in the end, no matter of how many lovely photos you have of something on the production line that hasn’t actually made it to me yet.
Paid for : November 2015
ETA for delivery: July 2016
New ETA for delivery: Some time never
Of course you shouldn’t use the Raspberry Pi or NanoPi boards if shipping 1000s of products. That’s what the the Raspberry Pi Compute Module and many other such module boards are for (many at very reasonable prices) or for many 1000s you can skip the modules and use the many SoC available directly.
But it was you who suggested the Raspberry Pi as an option.
Well yes, it’s same reason why there’s a Microchip logo on the gateway board. Can’t really see any other benefit a project like this would get from using a more expensive platform on a closed source (“Harmony”) OS.
My primary reason for excitement was the opportunity to have a open source packet forwarder that runs on a 32bit MCU, which will allow for cost shaving compared to the traditional RasPi approach. No-one will attempt a commercial gateway production with a RasPi, but will contemplate it wit a MCU integrated on the RF board. Including myself, because this was one of the missing pieces I was waiting for. I do want to run it on a plain Cortex-M4 tho, let’s see how portable it is.
Look at https://github.com/Lora-net/picoGW_mcu the lora-gateway runs on a STM32.
And there are people running packet-forwarder in STM32 too with the original untouched source code, just adding a POSIX library/emulator.
My thoughts exactly. Wearing very thin to the point being invisible.
It still needs a Linux host apparently. I was looking for a standalone solution where the MCU runs the packet forwarder and the IP stack .
But there is nothing wrong with using the RPi. We used 1000’s of the original board in a product and they keep on running and running. The Compute module wasn’t available back in the day and the only show in town was the original on. Works a dream. The RPi foundation were very, very supportive to industry.
We share your frustration. The only thing we can do is move through all the challenges of the delayed components and the all the hard bits about hardware development.
We aimed high by going for this price point in our ambition. And that challenge was bigger than we expected. At the moment all investments by the Kickstarter backers are going towards the out of pocket costs only and our company is investing heavily in all the work.
Hope you can imagine we have the same frustration and are with you and doing everything we can to get the products with you. We hope that through continuous communication and updates we keep everyone informed.
Oh my, no it is not easy. And we are adding some additional challenges to that like over the air updates, secure packet forwarder so it works on public networks, plug and play setup, lots of high quality documentation and videos and tutorials.
That’s true using the Raspberry Pi board is (cost, technically) effective up to point and I also see it very much like many PC makers - unless you’re Dell or some other big manufacturer you don’t really make their own motherboards, but buy a ready made one from Asus/Supermicro/etc.
I wouldn’t consider the Pi very robust though, especially the power supply section. There are others in the same spirit and price range which may be more adequate.
Actually MYiR recently announced a nice board based on NXP i.MX 6 rated for industrial applications for only $25 http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=561. I feel it would make a nice gateway board.
I don’t really like the title, does not really respect the hard work by the team and our partners. Does anybody mind me changing it to What is the status of the TTN Gateway?
Yes we do mind! Keep it as it is, please!
Working hard in itself is not a virtue, the only thing that counts is getting results which means in this case getting out to the Kickstarter backers. Complaining about the amount of money that has to be poured into this adventure does not make your case stronger. Do you think that in a commercial setting you would be allowed to over-run a project for more than a year? You would be out of your job long before!!
Come on, Wienke, you made such a big splash of TTN before you were anyway near sure that you could really deliver what was promised. Shit happens, this is not what you had wished or hoped for but be a man and make sure that TTN does not sink like your previous enterprise. We are running terribly out of time!!
That is motivating