kerlink LoRa gateway
Until the reality of a LoRa public network in France, to test this technology the best way is to have its own LoRaWAN getway. This is a thing done with the kerlink gateway.
This post will detail the first steps to install it and start to communicate.
IoT is generating data and to quicky look at it during the prototype phase is sounds good to plot these data in a dashboard. There are many solution you can install on your server and configure to get pretty nice dashboard. But if you want to go faster it would be really nice to have a SaaS solution for doing this. I have tested some of the solution I have found and friends helped me to found (not easy to search on google …). This post details these experiments
Microchip RN2483 Lora
After spending some time reading and writing about LoRa it was a good time to make some real test of this technology.
As actually there is no network for LoRa, as much as I know, in my town, I expected to start a simple LoRa test (point to point and not as part of a WAN). I just bought some RN2483 LoRa module from Microchip online and also get some from Avnet (thank you Guillaume)
The module is easy to solder on a prototype board and get its command over a serial port. I choose to make two modules :
LoRa is a dedicated network for Internet Of Things and Machine2Machine communications. It is actually the main competitor against SigFox.
As LoRa is actually rising in France with different announce from 2 of the main cellular operators deploying the network, it is a good time to have a post on what it is, how it works and what differs compared with SigFox.
When you start developing a GPS solution, you have to deal with energy and for this you have to create a strategy based on what you expect and the size of your battery.
Basically, a GPS is consuming about 25mA when running. An active antenna will consume about 10mA more. The first time you start it, it have to sync with the satellites, get the ephemeris then you can position in 2D then in 3D.
Read more for more information
Sigfox keyapp
The Sigfox keyapp is a useful tool you can buy or you can get when reaching the Sigfox kick-start session. Basically, this tool send a message each time you click on the button. This allow to check the network availability where you want just clicking on the button. Easy, useful !
The KeyApp have an internal battery, one led, one button. It is refill with the usb connector and it is based on TD1208. The internal firmware is a partial modem ; it can be used as a modem on serial port from a PC but not all the AT command are implemented on it.
My purpose was to modify this tool to send automatically message every 12 minutes. The firmware can be modified and upload on the standard way (take a look to my other posts). For sure by doing a such thing you take the risk of loosing warranty and you do it at your own risk.
To make it works you just have to know some of the cabling.
The battery is by default not powering the system until you switch USR1 to LOW. If you do not do this, the system will only work on the usb power. It means you can switch off the system simply by switching USR1 to high.
Will come soon a basic sample code.
SigFox downlink is now available since the Telecom Design SDK 5. This allow to send a message to your SigFox device from the network. You have a 4 message a day limitation.
This post will explain how to configure and use SigFox downlink
TD1205 – sigfox
The TD1205 device is more than the usual Telecom Design Sigfox embedded circuit as TD1204 and TD1208, they are a all in one chip providing GPS antenna and RF antenna. Ready to use, to be clear you just need to plug a battery to use it.
In my point of view, for many applications not requiring more than 2 GPIOs, this product is really easy and chip way to design a SigFox product. As it costs around 55$ and you just have to add box & battery id sounds like the most affordable for small quantities. But …
This post is detailing what is specific to this chip ; read more following the link