In a try to connect my LoRa gateway to a standard backend, I started to install TheThingsNetwork software stack. Even if I did not finish it because it was not compatible to my gateway protocol, here are my starting notes … May be completed later.

TheThingNetwork initiative provides a lot of tools. You can directly connect the kerlink BS this open crowd network but you have to flash a specific firmware (I assume I’ll try it, but later). They also provides tools I’ll try to connect to the standard firmware (eventually I could be lucky 😉 ). The tools are listed here at the end of the page.

Pre-requisite

You need to have GoLang installed and Docker to run the different tool provided by thethingnetwork. On a Centos7 you can follow this tuto to install Golang; I only changed the golang version to use 1.6.

To install Docker, you can follow this tuto.

Install RabbitMQ

# yum install epel-release
# yum -y install rabbitmq-server
# /sbin/service rabbitmq-server start
# setsebool -P nis_enabled 1
# systemctl enable rabbitmq-server

Install croft

Croft is a tool creating a UDP socket and pushing content to a RabbitMQ Queue for later processing. To start you have to clone the git repo and build the docker image

# git clone https://github.com/TheThingsNetwork/croft
# cd croft

We need to configure the rabbitMQ URI (really bad way to do it … comment welcome)

edit rabbit.go file and modify

       for i := 0; i < RABBIT_ATTEMPTS; i++ {
                uri := os.Getenv("AMQP_URI")
                uri = "amqp://my.server.name:5672"
                conn, err := amqp.Dial(uri)

Then we can build & run the docker image

# ./build.sh
...
# ./run.sh 
2016/03/11 14:09:00 Croft is ALIVE
2016/03/11 14:09:00 Connected to amqp://my.server.name:5672