Thanks fellas, i appreciate your help and insights. I’ll try explain my requirements a bit better;
I’m at the very start of this journey, having just developed the appetite to learn more about all things IoT starting with LoRaWan as there is some overlap with my job in local government
So for now this query is only for personal interest and learning
I’m reluctant to bite off more than i can chew, for that reason an out of the box ready GW may suit to get to grips with everything. Having said that, if you feel my sanity wouldn’t be impacted and the resources were there to assist with a raspberry-pi solution then id be all for it
Node wise, i would definitely say something to code, wire & experiment as this is not meant to serve any other purpose than developing my own knowledge. I guess something to have a bit of fun with!
Lastly as its a learning experiences, I’d prefer to keep the cost low, at least until i get an idea of what i can do with the technology
Sorry if this is a bit vague, but i’m am open to suggestions on solutions & paths you feel provide the best way to gain a practical understanding of LoraWan
Hi Bruce, I have two RAK831 gateways operating and one RAK7249 also. They have been going well. My question is regarding the Mikrotik units, can they be used in a remote situation with a built in modem for the 3g or 4g networks? That’s the 850 & 700Mhz bands, as I am in rural AU. My potential new deployment will be solar powered with no ethernet available (other than for power of course).
Not that one no. It has a SIM slot, but don’t be fooled as it only has one mini-PCIe slot and that’s full with the LoRa board. It looks probable that you could get their 4G router external box (random .au link) and put the LoRa9 board (intentionally available separately just for this purpose) in the spare slot. Their 4G modems don’t appear to have 700Mhz versions but I didn’t look too hard and I don’t have the band numbers memorised
I’ve had my gateway all of five days, so someone with some actual experience of this should probably speak up now. My initial glow of ownership is still firmly in place.
Yeah ok, I suspected as much, I got a basebox set up last year for a neighbour, and had to get a particular modem for the slot to get it to work. Pity. It looks like a good unit otherwise.
Thanks for the advice Bruce. Much appreciated!
Bearing in mind depending on where you are you may not need a gateway of your own (check ttnmapper.org at least).
The dev boards that come with a screen can be handy, and I guess at this point power consumption and range are not too critical for you.
You could start with the Arduino IDE/platform.io on the ESP32 base (TTGO, Heltec, etc) or the Heltec Cubecell range (arduino ide only, still). I’ve personally bought too many different boards, including the 8bit Arduino ones and the STM32 ones, and (right now, things change) the ESP32 and Cubecells have been the easiest to get working and extend – opinions here will definitely differ(!). The STM32 boards are possibly the best in spec terms, especially with the new all-in-one module, but the dev environment is hard work (powerful, but hard work) compared with the Arduino IDE
I’ve not used the Murata stuff (which looks very nice) or the rasppi with a hat, or the Adafruit feather or LoPy. Learning each dev environment and the foibles of each one and it’s associated stack is…time consuming.
There are heaps of threads on each of these here on the forum (and this thread is getting off topic), be prepared for some learning(/frustration) with any of them though.
Enjoy, and report back with your decision and lessons learnt
I had the same question, so I asked MikroTik. They told me the SIM socket is used for other products that use the same enclosure, but is non-functional if you have the LoRaWAN module. They recommended the RBLtAP-2HnD (https://mikrotik.com/product/ltap) for a device that can accommodate a LoraWAN gateway and a cellular modem in a single box. (I posted the same answer in the MikroTik thread MikroTik LoRaWAN gateways and concentrator boards).
Hi guys, i am just starting out in LORA and made the exact same mistake as Sean which was very frustrating to say the least and put me off for a few months… I am back at it now and want to make a start but also wish to know what a suitable gateway is for a newbie, preferably for outdoor use (i am a bit wary of the iot store for selling this in the first place!). Beyond that i am a bit lost as to how to view the data retrieved from end nodes, especially in the sense of providing an end user solution so they aren’t deciphering code but just presented with easy to read data, graphs etc. Is node-red the best for this sort of thing or does TTN provide an interface for end users?
Appreciate any and all information as im very new to this.
And Dragino gateway with an 8 or 16 in it, a TTIG or one of the RAK gateways. Find one you like the look of the price of and then search on here for feedback and then feel free to ask for a final thumbs up.
Outdoor gateways for inclement climes are quite expensive - having to be flood proof etc.
You can put your gateway next to a window and then upgrade the antenna with a short run of cable to something mounted outside. All gateways have the same source of chips (Semtech) so outdoor gateways tend to be about extras & being in heavy duty boxes.
I 100% agree with Nick about the gateways. Read some reviews, check what is available with the current supply shortages. Look for the features you need. If you are in Australia, are you planning to use AU915, AS923, or both?
Location and construction of your building can make a big difference. I’m in a timber house in rural New Zealand. I have an indoor gateway and get usable coverage up to 14 km line of sight. In a town or city, in a brick or concrete building, things will be very different. But you may get coverage from other nearby gateways.
For storage and presentation of data, I’ve been using mqtt, Node-Red, InfluxBD, and Grafana on a Raspberry Pi, based on the YouTube video’s by Andreas Spiess “The Swiss Guy”. This was set up for TTN V2 so it’s probably a bit “old school” now. The mqtt messages are different with the TTN V3 upgrade, the “node-red-contrib-ttn” package is depreciated, but the built in “mqtt in” connector works fine with TTN V3 and it can all be adapted.
TTN V3 has new Web APIs which is another way to go. Read the documentation https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/ and have a good search through the forum for other approaches.
You can ether deploy a application locally on a PI, local pc or server. OR you can opt for a cloud instance AWS, Linode, Oracle… most of these offer a free service on their smallest EC varying from a few dollars worth of services to always free servises.
Node-Red is relatively easy to use and on there forum there is a lot of support. You can deploy Node-red on any of these services, be it local or in the cloud.
Most of the cloud providers you can run some type of storage up to 20G for free (you need to read the fin print). Here you can choose also the flavor you like, MySQL, InfluxDB, Postgresql…
Another useful tool is Grafana as a dashboard, it works with most Data Bases and the recall of data is relatively easy to integrate. It uses the same query as the Data Base you chosen.
Grafana offers a excellent user Dashboard, so does Node-Red offer a dashboard.
Grafana you can iFrame into Node-Red or even into a web page.
InfluxDB also use a dashboard (I have not used it)
Now it is up to you to do a bit of research in each of these and decide the flavor you prefer.
@uptones You have good suggestions form Nick, Andy and Johan above that I would broadly endorse. My one caveat would be to ask if you have networking/comms experience as the Mikrotik is a router & associated dedicated routerOs and set up GUI with LoRa(WAN) grafted on and can be a heavy lift/steep curve for some (there is even a thread comparing Microtik LR8 & Dragino LPS8! - use forum search) I use both but YMMV, also for a really quick win and demo graphs/data capture/dashboard etc you can do worse than use a TTN Webhook direct from TTN Application to Cayenne/MyDevices for quick demo/show and tell - where a decoder is readily available or where device is using C-LPP or is in their repository so you just chose and run I can get graphs up in <2-5 mins depending on set up. More serious work of course would call for storage, structured DB’s etc and the things called out above are all good…
Thanks Nick! I went with a Dragino LPS8 and also a DLOS8, i have a use case for a remote site monitoring device so hopefully one of these will get the job done… now i just have to figure out how to get them connected!
Thanks Jeff, I went with Dragino LPS8 which from all accounts should work but i can see there will be some learning hurdles getting the display of data problem sorted. Thanks for your feedback.
That would be great! So far I have bought a LDDS75 ultrasonic level sensor and a LT-22222-L io controller. I have successfully been able to connect and read data from the LDDS75 through TTN on Node-RED but it still needs some work as it seems to drop out while i am not online? Basically if i am logged in and looking at it, it will keep transmitting its data every 20 min but if i log off, even though the gateway is still up and internet still good, the data is not visible. So for example if i go to bed i would expect to log in to TTN in the morning and see the nights data log but there is nothing there. However once i become active on TTN, the data starts coming through as normal… I would hope to use the ultrasonic as a monitoring device to either start a pump, send an sms or trigger an alarm if a tank got low but this wont work if the system goes to sleep as it seems to do…
Beyond all that, yes im very interested in any dashboard recommendations, I am yet to look at the io controller and am sure that will bring a new set of challenges haha…
Can you clarify what you mean by “not online” - Node-RED will have to be running all the time if you are to receive data through it - and the typical routing for that combo is Influx for a db and Grafana for the dashboard. See Visualizing Lora Node data with Node-red and Grafana - Hackster.io
