Category Archives: News

My own news on technology and all the one i’m specially sensitive
Petits mots sur mon actualité technologique où celles du monde auxquelles je suis sensible.

First steps with Mioty with Miromico Edge gateway

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I’ve been following Mioty for a long time now, but until recently, it was more of a vaporware in terms of testability than a deployable technology. I won’t go back over the nauseating marketing communication led by those promoting this technology, as I’ve already touched on that in several articles.

The good news is that for the past few months, it has been possible to deploy it thanks to the excellent Miromico solution, a Miro Edge gateway, which is essentially an indoor LoRaWAN gateway with an integrated Mioty receiver in place of the LoRa concentrator.

Before diving into the details of Mioty, to define it briefly: it is a radio solution very close to LR-FHSS, which breaks down a message into small packets that are widely transmitted across the spectrum with redundancy, creating both temporal and frequency spreading. This reduces the risk of collision, increases capacity, and improves performance at the edge of the coverage area (which makes sense, especially in satellite communication where LR-FHSS is used).

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TheThingsConference 2024

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On September 25th and 26th, the new edition of TheThingsConference was held, the must-attend event of the LoRaWAN ecosystem and, more broadly, LPWAN. Even though the event, which was very open, is naturally becoming increasingly focused on TheThingsIndustrie’s solution and thus LoRaWAN, it remains an opportunity for numerous discussions in many other areas.

The organization was, as always, perfect, with ample space for side events that provide great opportunities for networking.

There were few announcements this year beyond the arrival of TheThingsIndustrie’s “plug & play” gateway and the introduction of trackers in the form of solar-powered tags, which seem to confirm the trend of IoT in this form factor, following RAK Sodaq and many other ongoing projects.

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Take aways from 2024 LPWAN days at Pau

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LPWAN Day is an annual conference for university research in the field of LPWAN. This year’s edition was held in Pau. The event provides an opportunity to review the state of research on technologies such as LoRaWAN, Mioty, Wirepas, and satellite experiments, fostering technical, detailed, and inspiring exchanges.

This year, about sixty participants attended, mainly from academia but also from industries like Semtech, Wirepas, Schneider, and Kineis. As in every edition, we had many very in-depth and passionate discussions. The organization was flawless, and the hospitality in Pau was exceptional. However, I must admit that our visits to Glacier Giorgios may have skewed our perceptions.

In summary, it was two wonderful days, with beautiful weather and exceptional people. Here are my key takeaways.

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News from LoRaWAN Live Munich

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This week saw the Munich edition of LoRaWAN Live, the event for the LoRaWAN community organized by the LoRa Alliance. This event rotates locations with each iteration, and this edition marked the return of the event to Europe.

As usual, the event was a professional gathering for alliance members who use these events to advance the evolution of the LoRaWAN standard. Participants included gateway manufacturers, device makers, and electronic component producers. Unfortunately, this focus, often comes at the expense, of non-member users and smaller players, who are less present compared to events like The Things Conference or larger, more general conferences, like IoT Solutions.

The main downside of this conference, in my opinion, was the low attendance of end users and newcomers. This is likely due to the high cost of attending the conference, not to mention the hotel prices during the Euro 2024 period.

Despite this, the conference featured a series of high-quality presentations on the development of use cases, market growth, and opportunities for in-depth discussions with technology experts. As always, it was a chance to meet new people and have engaging conversations.

So, what’s the state of the LoRaWAN ecosystem in 2024?

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Evolution of Usage on the Helium IoT Network

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In an article written in 2022, following an unwarranted and poorly executed attack that reduced the value of the Helium network to the nascent consumption of data, erroneously overvalued at $6600, I began monitoring the usage of the network over the months.

To give some context, Helium is a DAO governing the operation of several networks: LoRaWan (IoT), CBRS (4/5G), and WiFi. A DAO is a distributed organization using blockchain to govern its operational processes. This project is one of the pioneers of what we now call DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks), which bridge the virtual world of blockchain with the physical world around us and generally translate into service offerings consumable in the traditional economic circuit, competing with equivalent services in the traditional economy.

Helium is the largest deployed LoRaWan network in the world. It is used for roaming by numerous telecom operator networks and natively by many companies deploying fleets of connected objects. For my part, since 2021, I have been the first to provide commercial and open access to individuals and businesses to this network to connect their objects, through the service Helium IoT Console delivered by IngeniousThings. For this reason, I pay particular attention to monitoring usage on the IoT network.

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SenseCAP T1000-A tracker

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SenseCAP (Seeedstudio) has launched a Kickstarter campaign for launching it new LoRaWan product, a tracker based on LR1110 Semtech transceiver. This Kickstarter is a bit unusual as the product is already designed and operational. It’s more a way to have a minimum of order to initiate a production batch with a guaranteed volume.

This tracker exists in different version with different capabilities and sensors. The version I received for testing it is a T1000-A, able to get outdoor position with GNSS, indoor position with WiFi, temperature, light and accelerometer data.

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Industrial IoT (IIoT) vs IoT for industry (IoT4i)

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You heard these terms, increasingly used, that are IoT (Internet of Things) and IIoT (Industrial IoT). Terms that seem so close that we tend to think that they are intimately linked, or even that they address the same thing but in a different context, which for the second would be that of industry. But the technicians, or marketers, are teasing or, because they surf the trends, it tends to generate misleading shortcuts.

You understand, behind my words, that there is no more than a fairly distant cousinship between IoT and IIoT. I will try to explain why and what are the consequences of these differences on the technologies used in each of these areas.

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Repair broken Nebra indoor with eMMC failure

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The first versions of Nebra indoor miner came with CM3 (Raspberry Pi Compute Module) embedding eMMC memory. As you may know, Helium has been really I/O intensive, particularly this summer when the blockchain was filling really fast the small amount of storage the CM3 has. As a consequence, all my Nebra indoor miner dead around the same week. Diagnostic seemed to be a storage failure.

Here is the story about making them live again

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