After several weeks of debugging I have a fully working ChirpStack v4 gateway running on a Rock Pi 4B+ with a Nebra Indoor LoRa HAT. I’ve written it up and published a setup script because there was almost nothing documented for this exact hardware combination.
The two problems that took the most time:
The Armbian SPI overlay system silently ignores overlays on current Trixie builds for the Rock Pi 4B+. The script uses the rk3399-spi-spidev overlay which actually works, and falls back to direct DTB editing if needed.
The GL5712-UX concentrator module (found in older Nebra HATs) has a hardware inverter on the NRESET line. HIGH = chip in reset, LOW = chip running. This is the opposite of the standard SX1301 reference design. If anything holds NRESET HIGH — including a GPIO daemon — the chip never comes out of reset and SPI returns 0x00 for everything. The fix is to let chirpstack-concentrator own NRESET exclusively via sx1301_reset_chip/sx1301_reset_pin in the TOML, and only hold POWER_EN in the systemd service.
The repo covers both GL5712-UX (SX1301) and RAK2287 (SX1302) modules with auto-detection.
How soon will you be repurposing the firmware and targeting TTN deployment? Can’t tell exactly from picture but guess you are not far from either the TTN-Newcastle or TTN-Tyne Valley, Consett or even Durham Communities who would always welcome another Gateway! If not deploying to TTN are you peering with TTN? (PacketBroker)
Whilst this Forum is for LoRaWAN in general it is focussed on TTI/TTN and is paid for by TTI so whilst your story is welcome and good for others to follow we always look for the right tie-in and relationship to TTI/TTN.
Great shout, and yes, I’m in Gateshead, so TTN-Newcastle is exactly my local community, good spot!
The build was quite a journey getting here, the SX1301 concentrator gave me a serious fight before it finally came good, but the gateway is fully working now.
ChirpStack v4 supports PacketBroker peering natively which would allow my existing private gateway to also share coverage with TTN without any extra hardware, I’m going to look into getting that configured. Rather than just running everything privately it would be great to give something back to the community and get some Gateshead coverage on the map, I don’t think there’s much around here so it could be a useful addition.
Give me a bit of time to get it set up properly and I’ll report back with how it goes. Looking forward to being part of the local community!
Have done some mapping in the general area and always disappointed that visits to Gibside yield no coverage despite having 3-6 trackers with me each visit! Another GW in the Gateshead area would be welcome - even if just peering - higher up around Whickham to Greenside area and into the hills helping to get coverage into the Tyne Valley…..
If not deploying to TTN are you peering with TTN? (PacketBroker)
