@jmarcelino From what I understand, SD cards are not tuned to the host system and tend to have poor interface designs which over time result in what people call bitrot. The result is that over months of use there will be data loss and eventually file system corruption. Onboard eMMC is designed with the host controller platform in mind besides having it’s own NAND controller. Not only does this make them generally faster but also able to handle bit errors better. I think there might be better wear leveling too but not sure there.
Originally my concern was mostly having to do with the physical tension based contacts of an SD card in a system which would be mounted outside. The slightest moisture on the contacts would lead to corrosion while eMMC are soldered on. No mechanical issues either.
So I’m even skipping over the low end Odroid because the eMMC is an addon-card. The OrangePi and Beaglebone Black eMMC are soldered on.
Yeah but would come at a cost for their own gateway sales, which is the product they actually want to develop and support.
Let’s be fair here TTN is far more than the gateway, they’ve put a ton of work into the backend - open for everyone to use, dealing with the LoRa Alliance and having all these great resources like the Website/Forum/Slack we all love. They wouldn’t be able to do that on razor-thin gateway margins, that’s for sure.
The only downside is this was probably also the reason they went all-in with a PIC32/Microchip gateway solution, to me far from ideal compared to an open and hardware independent Linux one - a solution also proving troublesome to them considering the Kickstarter delays.
I was the one who suggested a “crowdbuy”, and I’m still game, but it was kinda put off for a while to see what the pricing would be on gateways with the new and cheaper SX1308 chip. Have yet to see a gateway with this though.
“[Multitech] Conduit AP supports eight uplink and one downlink LoRa channels capable of supporting thousands of LoRaWAN end points” sounds like a Sx13… chip to me
Sorry if I seemed to be knocking the hard work of the people who have created TTN, that wasn’t my intention. It is a fantastic achievement to have developed TTN to the point where it is today.
Before I discovered The Things Industries, I did wondered how they “keep the lights on”.
However, if TTN is going to be a network that is actually worth using for anything other than seeing how far you can send a signal, it has to have enough gateways. There are Zero active gateways showing on the map within 100 miles of my location in the South East of Britain!
Without a company paying to install gateways we enthusiasts will have to bear the costs.
I’m prepared to put some into this, but I can’t justify £250 on the official gateway.
The commercial side of TTN is/will benefit from our investment, reducing the barrier to entry helps everyone.
Bulk buying, and selling at a small profit, would reduce the cost to us to get a gateway up and going.
Those people who want a ready made solution will still buy the existing gateway, those of us who just want to get going on the network will have built our own anyway.
@Epyon I was under the impression that the SX1308 was a lower power/range chip, or am I wrong?
Currently, if a crowdbuy is organised would be interested. I’ll probably limp along on my single channel gateway for a while until I get frustrated with OTAA not working correctly.
[quote=“SgtWilko, post:14, topic:5571, full:true”] @Epyon I was under the impression that the SX1308 was a lower power/range chip, or am I wrong?[/quote]
I actually don’t know. I was under the impression it was a production optimized version of the SX1301, but haven’t followed up on it.
The sx1308 is functionnaly the same as the sx1301. The only difference is the temperature range wich are the ‘commercial’ one +0°C +70°C for indoor use. While the sx1301 is in the ‘industrial’ range -40°c +85°C suitable for outdoor use.
No it doesn’t. It is called PicoCell as reference to cellular picocell/femtocell, where you put some HW to enhance coverage in some areas - typically office floors. In this case you don’t need to support extreme conditions.
Have there been any concentrator boards/gateways announced the use the new sx1308 chip?
Is it worth waiting to see?
I’m not in a rush, but only a couple of weeks into using LoRa I’m already seeing the limitations of a single/dual channel gateway.
I got a price for a single board from Rising HF, and with shipping & import tax it’s cheaper for me to get a ic880 board. Obviously the bulk price is far cheaper and makes the Rising HF board the better option, if only we could get them!
I saw this https://hackaday.io/project/13373/ DIY concentrator board, it doesn’t yet work and is for 433MHz, but other than that looked promising.
