Category Archives: Technology

Tips and test on technological product and components. Operating system, networks, hardware, security…
Astuces et tests autour de produits et composants technologiques, systèmes, réseaux, hardware, sécurité …

Make your own private network on top of Helium IoT network

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Helium is a multi network server with a decentralized packet routing system. This is really clever and allows anyone to use the public infrastructure as private LoRaWAN compatible network. That way you get benefit of a worldwide coverage and, in the same time, the ability to protect your raw data from anyone looking at them. You can also create some other public network server, as we are doing with Helium-Iot.eu

The objective of a such public service is to offer a shorter route for your European devices and as a consequence a shorter response time for downlink. It also ensure your data to stay in Europe, something important for personal data like tracking, health or for industrial applications.

For a better understanding, let’s take a look at the Helium network architecture:

Helium network architecture

Thanks to the miner components incorporated in the hotspots, the traffic from the devices is directly routed to the right network server. Each of the network servers belongs to a, operator, it can be you or me or any established telecom operator. This is basically really cool !

That’s why we have decided with the company I work for to take a look at this business and launched Helium-IoT.eu. So you can connect your devices to Helium using our console https://console.helium-iot.eu

In the next page of this post I will explain how to become your own operator for making your private network. This is a bit complex operations, so if you want your own network server, as part of our services we are proposing to make it for you and host it. We also have solutions to migrate existing LoRaWan networks to Helium. Just let us know by contacting me with the contact link.

So, let’s be more technical to understand all of this.

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BalenaFin – compute module motherboard

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The BalenaFin board, made by balena.io is a compact Raspberry Pi compute module 3 mother board.

This kind of setup is really useful when making industrial embedded systems in small to average volume like I did and described in a previous post presenting my solution on waveshare system.

I thank you Balena.io, especially Marc, for giving me the opportunity to test this product. So you understand I did not payed to get that one, but as usual, I’m totally free about what I’m writing about it.

The BalenaFin costs $129 w/o taxes and can be ordered on the balena shop. So, let’s how to use it and get benefit of the balena.io platform.

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Radio cable selection for outdoor (LoRaWan) antenna

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When looking for a cable to connect an antenna, you need to consider different parameters:

  • The cable loss at 868MHz (if corresponding)
  • The connector type

In this post I’ve tried to list some of the mostly used cable and connectors for connecting LoRaWan antennas.

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Migration to TTN v3

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Announced during TheThingsConference 2021 this January, TheThingsNetwork console is upgrading to v3. In fact it is really more than a simple update because this consist in merging TheThingsNetwork and TheThingsIndustrie in a common environment. This upgrade is really different than a traditional upgrade because it has an impact on any gateways and any devices ; a big impact anyone needs to manage. Here are some of the currently known impacts on the networks and the different components:

  • Traffic from v2 is routed to v3 but v3 is not routed to v2
  • Gateway are not migrated automatically
  • LoRa Application/Integration needs to be re-created in v3 to communicate over v3
  • Device LoRaWan session needs to be refreshed
  • Coverage map are lost
  • Gateways using gRPC protocol (TTN Packet forwarder won’t relay V3 traffic over V2)
  • … some more to be discovered

As the Network is managed by many different people, and not really planned and organized by TheThingsIndustry, we are going to have disconnections and fields operations to make all of this back to life.

It concerns the TTN Initiators (people deploying the network) but also the TTN users because they need to update Applications and restart/rejoin devices once the V2 has disappeared.

The currently know planning for Europe is (Other countries not yet planned)

  • April 2021 – v2 console will be read-only (you won’t be able to add devices / gateways)
  • September 2021 – v2 infrastructure will be switched off, no more communication on it

This blog post details my advises and experience of the migration. As I’ll do it in different waves for practical reason, this post will be updated. So please come back and refresh all along the months of February-March 2021 to get the updates, content and advice will be updated according to my progress.

Personal current advice about migration: START INVESTIGATING SINGLE DEVICE MIGRATION

I had some difficulties to migrate my first device and this has been solved by upgrading the gateway and redefining it in the TTNv2 backend. Discovering such situation earlier is important to get on time for upgrading. I recommend to start migrating 1 device to identify such situation. Migrating more than a device could still means impossible ways for some of your devices to communicate through v2 infrastructure. But it will help to prepare your infrastructure for migration.

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Is Sigfox really (in)secured ?

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A recent publication analyzed the Sigfox protocol security, This is the most advanced work I’ve seen on this so it is interesting to go to some details about it. The author is Loïc Ferreira working for Orange Labs, Applied Cryptography Group at Caen,France. This report has been shared with Sigfox by the Author on August 2020.

In this post, I’ll not challenge any of the outcomes from Loïc as it is a serious researcher. What I want to do is to highlight this with the ability for someone to use this to make a successful attack against a device and in what conditions.

I love to say, in the security domain, that sometime, IoT attacks are like explaining how to destroy earth and humanity by changing the course of the moon to make that one crashing on its target: Theoretically it is possible, technically we could find ways to make is possible for an extraordinary cost. Practically speaking, the one doing it will also kills itself, so there is no big gain to expect.

So, let’s take a look to the different breaches reported on the publication…

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RAK Wisgate Egde Light review

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RAK is one of the most famous LoRaWan gateway manufacturer in the hacker space as they have made HAT for raspberry Pi since a while.

I’m not a big fan of RPI based gateways as I do not want to manage RaspiOS and Rpi hardware and really prefer to have an all in one product well integrated when deploying Gateways. So the Wisgate solution is a better choice in my point of view and it has taken time before I decided to buy one of them.

I’ve bought this one for my next project of LoRaWan solar gateway as I want this one to be fully autonomous, including a 4G connectivity. I have multiple candidate gateways for this like the Kerlink iFemToCell evolution and this Wisgate Edge. The Wisgate price is lower at $249 compared to 325€ for the Kerlink. For this reason, and the fact I already tested the iFemToCell some years ago, my first choice has been on the RAK gateway.

So let’s review this Rak Wisgate gateway !

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Migrate Helium Miner hardware

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Helium is a crowdsourced / blockchain IoT network running on hardware like raspberryPi. You can more details on this blog post describing Helium network. Sometime you can have to move you miner from one hardware to another and this task needs to be executed shortly because you stop the IoT communication during this step. Here how I did proceed for my miner.

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RAK WisBlock – a kind of industrial Arduino

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RAK is a company specialized in IoT hardware, particularly in the LoRaWan domain. They are well known for their LoRaWan concentrators working with raspberryPi.

Since a couple of month they have launched a new family of device, the Wisblock. This is a kind of Arduino solution with a MCU part (running a NRF chip with a LoRa transceiver) and different sensors you can connect to it to make an IoT device. That’s a really simplified way to see the solution as in fact the architecture is really different.

At first, the solution is based on a motherboard where you can plug different type of modules. You can have multiple additional sensors both side of the motherboard. We are also going to see that the way all of this is connected is industrial and can be use for prototypes, medium scale field deployment and finished product. That’s the main difference with a classical Arduino board.

The unit price of a solution with a GPS, MCU, Accelerometer is about $50, nothing really expensive for prototyping, a bit too high for a field experimentation, really high for an end product but apparently you can negotiate that price when you have a certain volume.

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