Community centre location and gateway location reporting

#1

After noticing that the Liverpool community had no gateways listed, but not really understanding what had happened, the Leeds and Bradford community pointed out that the lat and lon settings were transposed and placed the Liverpool community over towards the Seychelles!

But the reason that I didn't see this straight away, was the communities page and the gateways array information in the MQTT messages seemed to be coming from different sources. The mis-placed gateway had the location set incorrectly in the packet forwarder local_conf.json, but set correctly in the gateways console.

This meant that:

  • MQTT messages through the gateway had the lat/lon taken from the gateways console settings,
  • gateway locations in the communities page were taken from the gateway fake gps report.

Is this part of removing reliance on the fake gps figures for gps-less gateways?

(Hylke Visser) #2

The gateway is always the primary source of information, so if the gateway sends a location to our servers, we will use this location (even if it's wrong). If the gateway does not send a location, we use the location that was set in the console.

The location information on MQTT is "realtime", while the community pages are only updated "regularly". This means that the location might not always be consistent if a gateway is moving (or thinks it is).

P.S. I strongly discourage using the fake_gps configuration option, so please switch this off.