Conceptual view of lora, gateway, lorawan, concentrator, TTN

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chrisjx
 
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Conceptual view of lora, gateway, lorawan, concentrator, TTN

Post by chrisjx »

A while back I purchased an Adafruit Radio + OLED bonnet (RFM69 or RFM9x) and a Feather RFM9x with a thought to explore the lora radio for long range ~ half a mile sensor devices.

Now finally starting to look at it and I am confused about some of the terminology. I see talk of lora, lorawan, and gateway devices. I have set up raspi gateways for wifi and xbee/zigbee but here there are discussions about using The Things Network. On the map from the TTN site I see a gateway is about 50 miles away, so... I'm not really interested in setting up an external setup unless I'm routing out to some API through a satellite (ugh) connection.

I thought that a lora gateway would run on a raspi just like the one I set up for xbee. I'd like to do the same only with lora radios. All the tutorials seem to indicate they're deprecated because of a protocol change with TTN. But I don't think I need TTN... Do I?

Then I see there is the idea of a concentrator. What is that? I see an 8 channel device from Adafruit but I never needed a multi-channel device for xbee; at least I don't recall that.

Is there some scenario where I can have a raspi/lora gateway and receive and send data to a dozen or more lora devices to open/close gates, track water trough levels, open/close water valves and manage things on a farm that is a little less than one mile long?

Thanks for any tips,
Chris.

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chrisjx
 
Posts: 94
Joined: Mon Aug 09, 2010 6:17 am

Re: Conceptual view of lora, gateway, lorawan, concentrator, TTN

Post by chrisjx »

Looking now at the adafruit learning article:
https://learn.adafruit.com/multi-device ... k/overview

It appears the deprecation is mainly about the connectivity to The Things Network (TTN). I don't think I need that for now.

To summarize what I found:
  • lora - radio, wireless modulation technique, long range, low power, slow, small packets
  • gateway - manages radio packets in/out of system
  • lorawan - network protocol, software layer which defines how devices use the LoRa hardware
  • concentrator - ???
  • TTN - The Things Network, a LoRaWAN Network Server https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/l ... s-lorawan/
The article referenced above from adafruit shows how to use multiple lora radios transmitting data to a raspi gateway (w/ Adafruit Radio + OLED bonnet) to the Adafruit IO system. I should be able to modify the Adafruit IO code and send the data to my Node-red raspi and merge it into my MQTT pub/sub feed.

My home setup uses node-red on a raspi as the main controller, mostly using mqtt as the central protocol. I have another raspi for graphite/grafana charts, another as a dedicated xbee gateway, and another as a rocket-chat server (experimental). The system also manages old school X10 light switches, and esp8266 devices mostly in the Wemos D1 Mini form (w/ tasmota). So the lora gateway is just another radio protocol in which I will convert to mqtt as close up the chain as possible.

Now to learn how to transmit from node-red (using mqtt) to the raspi/lora gateway to a lora actuator endpoint. I suspect there's some trickery to interrupting the listening to execute a transmit.

Any tips on that would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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