When looking for a cable to connect an antenna, you need to consider different parameters:
In this post I’ve tried to list some of the mostly used cable and connectors for connecting LoRaWan antennas.
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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:
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)
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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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 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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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 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.
Continue readingI’m a big fan of PiHole for my children but also for my IoT devices [not the one I build but the one I’m purchasing 🙂 ]. That said, there are two things missing in it:
So, when a friend of me contacted me to share its work on a different solution using a proxy, I’ve been happy to let him make a blog post here to introduce his solution. And this solution can be used in complement of PiHole. So, let’s make some place here to Manu PILLANT
Continue readingRecurrent step when making an IoT device, the antenna matching is a key activity to get the right radio performance for your device. You radio strip and antenna must be tuned to match a 50 Ohm impedance. For doing this I’m using a miniVNA Tiny Vector Network Analyzer (until a switch to my Rigol Spectrum Analyzer) as described on the previously linked post.
The impact of a correct antenna matching has been addressed in an old post on this blog also.
Currently, to tune my antennas, I’m also using the Atyune tool. This tool is free and really good to make the tuning but also to get a better understanding of what you are doing. Let’s see how to proceed.
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