Raspberry Pi 3B+ as LoraServer and gateway

1

Hello,

I have a Raspberry pi 3b+ and a Dragino lora/gps HAT model (this one : https://www.elektor.fr/dragino-lora-gps-hat-for-raspberry-pi-868-mhz, version 1.4). My device is an atim which I received AppKey, DevEUI, DevAddr, AppEUI, NwkSkey and AppSKey when I bought it and it only uses OTAA.

Is it possible to use my raspberry and runs simultaneously a gateway (using dual_chan library for example) and Lora Server ? Instead of sending this data to ttn, I send it locally, in cvs file
I don’t have any idea how to start with !

Thank you for helping :smiley:

2

The short answer is yes.
You should look at Brocaar’s implementation, LoRa Gateway OS

This link give you some knowledge about the images provided images,LoRa Gateway OS image types

One concern I do have with this type of configuration is that,

  • SD cards are slow
  • Being flash memory, lot’s of writing, “PostgreSQL”, is likely to cause premature failure of the SD card which at this time is not characterized

I wonder if toying with the ODROID-N2 with 4GByte RAM, some time ib the future, as a Gateway, might be worthwhile. It is much faster than a Pi, has more memory and, it runs on a much faster MMC card/chip.

.

3

Thank you for help,

In order to use LoRa OS, I saw on this site I should use one of their gateway, so I bought a new one (IMST - iC880A), it seems to be easier using it instead of the dragino

Moreover, I saw on ttn dragino single channel isn’t “LoRaWAN-compliant”, is it because of this single channel I can’t join ttn and device (by OTAA) ?

4

In different countries, there are different rules. In North America, ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) frequency allocation is from 902 MHz to 928 MHz. In the UK ISM is from ??? to ???, it’s different.
In addition, the use of these frequencies is governed by specific legislation and that also differs from country to country.
I gleaned the knowledge about this and more by reading, reading, reading, an re-reading and I’m still reading.
It seems nasty but, you need to do some more reading. Check out the publicly available documents at the LoRa Alliance, most of what you want to know is there, and of course, Semtech has a wealth of reading material.
In a simplified way, a single channel gateway will work, in experimentation, but as it lacks many operational features it probably won’t perform very well.

5

So,
When I use the dragino as gateway, join request doesn’t work (I just receive the join request, but I guess the gateway doesn’t anwser).
And when I use the ic880a, there is no more problem.

I guess single channel works only on one way, so it can’t do the same way backward.