Microchip RN2483 Lora
Making downlink working correctly with RN2483 on LoRaWan is not a simple a quick thing to do if you do not have all the keys to do it. After spending some time to fix my code for this, here are the tips to consider and not forget !
I was looking for a real LoRaWan experimentation on the field, not only a given open field performance where the result do not match the reality.
For this reason, I installed a Kerlink gateway on a friend’s balcony living on a high part of my city. Then I moved a tracker reporting its GPS position on regular basis and day after day I built a map of the area covered by this antenna.
This post details the results of this expermientation
During last Devoxx in Paris, I made a talk about IoT and Sigfox with my friend Daniel. Here is the talk (in french).
Once you have found the great idea of the year and you want to start implementing your first prototype it is time to choose the right technology. Some would say you should not choose at this step and implement both at end but in my point of view it looks like and economical mistake to do this way. Prototype is to demonstrate and final product. It can request another technology, for sure. But in my point of view the best is to take the right one at the beginning. For most LoRa and Sigfox are both equivalent or for some others one is over the other one, best depends who you ask. In my point of view, if I consider my 2-3 years sigfox experience and my starting experience on LoRa with 1 year background research on it, there is no magic answer. Context of your idea is the keypoint then you have some technical elements to take into account to finalize your decision.
This post will try to illustrate where each of the technology is the best and give you some decision keypoints.
TFT screen on a raspberryPi
This week I had to play with some TFT screen for RapberryPi for making a prototype for a local company. You can find many TFT screen on Internet but most of them are not coming with a nice fresh documentation for being use and it is kickly a mess to get it start with them. I ordered different one having the same 3.2” size matching my need and got 2 of them for starting tests.
This post details how to use a such screen for displaying a picture on it from a console line.
Measuring a pulse duration in a pulse train was my last week headache with the TD1208 and the not so well documented EFM32. Basically, my objective was to activate a timer on a pulse train to measure the duration of the pulse. This duration was measured about 100uS and occurred at 1 Hz.
My choice was to rise an interrupt on each signal front (raising and falling) and measure the duration between the two first interrupt call. Some reset function ensure we are measuring the low state duration (100uS) not the high state duration (1s). This part will not be described here. The purpose of this post is to describe the main hole I fallen in.
LoRa GPS Tracker
Todays work was to make a simple GPS tracker communicating over LoRaWAN to check the coverage of my LoRaWan gateway in the city. Basically this tracker reports a position per minute to the network. If coverage is good, position will be recorded in the backend. That’s all !
This post details how to do it easily with the low cost and common components : Arduino for the master, Microchip RN2483 for LoRaWan communication and L80 for GPS positioning.
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.