Can the Basic Station software be used with RAK831 on RPI?

Gateways
#1

Hi

Does anybody know if we can install the new Basic Station packet forwarder on the RAK831 + RPI gateway?

#2

You might be able (probably not too hard), how ever TTN does not use that protocol yet. So it’s only useful if you run your own V3 instance.

#3

Are you sure V3 is needed? It seems the new the Things Indoor Gateway is using this too, which then probably needs some Station to Packet Forwarder Protocol Bridge somewhere on TTN’s V2 servers. (I doubt any such bridge would be in the TIG itself.)

@bluejedi, you attended the Semtech Packet Forwarder ‘workshop’ (presentation) which also mentioned the SIG, right?

#4

Messages on the forum indicate the new gateway needs to be configured to use legacy mode in the TTN console at the moment. That to me suggests V2 is not ready for the new protocol.

#5

…or that checkbox just enforces one enters an EUI, rather than comes up with some nice name. :slight_smile:

#6

I attended Semtech’s presentation but do not recall those details. The Things Indoor Gateway (TIG) indeed uses the new Basic Station software (implemented as firmware on ESP8266) which was specifically designed for low resource usage (otherwise an implementation on ESP8266 would not have been possible). Details about Basic Station can be found in the documentation.
No details specific to the ESP8266 implementation and the sources for the ESP8266 implementation are currently closed (not open) source.

In the Base Station documentation ‘Raspberry PI + IMST iC880A shield’ is listed as supported platform so my assumption is that it should work with RAK concentrator boards like RAK851, RAK833, and RAK2245 as well.

IIRC some additional service(s) was made available on the TTN backend to make the TIG work. Possibly an authentication service but I do not remember the details (the presentation was mainly an overview and not a ‘deep dive’).

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#7

Meanwhile, the UART log files posted elsewhere also make clear the TIG uses the Basic Station software. But even then, I guess one would need to know the URLs from which the TIG fetches its Basic Station configuration (if one can even authenticate then), if one would want to use whatever workaround/bridge/… TTN is using on V2 to support the TIG.

So in the end I guess the following is very true :slight_smile:

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#8

There is an example configuration in the source for " Station to Packet Forwarder Protocol Bridge (st2pkfwd)". Could this be the solution?

I am very, very new in the TTN world, but I do have basicstation running on a Pi/RAK831 combination. I am seeing “RX” lines in my log, so I assume I am receiving. I have only tested the “live-s2.mx” config, and I am not able to get it connected in TTN console. I guess that is pure v3.

There was one thing I had to do to get basicstation working. I had to run this little script to reset the rak.

#!/bin/bash
echo “17” > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo “out” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/direction
echo “1” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
sleep 5
echo “0” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
sleep 1
echo “0” > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value

#9

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