Creating a LORAWAN gatway from esp32

This project:

on this PCB:

with this concentrator card:

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Great, thatā€™s the bit I was missing. I had previously found the board with apparently same ref but SPI header only, supporting the SMTC ref design, but hadnā€™t seen the mPCIe implementation. Warry of latter so far due to mix up of pinouts and incompatibilities on what should be a standard connector (vendors are you listening?), have a small stock of Seeed and a couple of RAK and was looking at a project for 1h24 so this may save me some efforts :wink: Not worried about LBT at this point so thatā€™s not an issue here. Nick @descartes had just pointed me to the s/w repository so looking good.

Looks like I might have to grab a couple of the Elecrow conc bds :slight_smile: was looking at pairing with their HAT anyhow for Pi buildsā€¦.

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can I register this to TTN?

Yes, itā€™s an 8 channel gateway.

Question is, can you assemble it from the plans & parts?

As above, itā€™s a balance between buying a TTIG for ~US$100 and being 99.999% sure of success vs buying ~US$50 worth of parts and spending hours trying to get it to work with an unknown success rate.

This is the sort of excitement I experience on a monthly basis when I spin a PCB, place the components, run it through the SMD oven and then test the first board.

For one off items, itā€™s cheaper in time & lower stress at this money saving ratio. If I was saving double or triple, then itā€™s worth a punt.

For bulk runs, then the first few will be ā€œinterestingā€ but then it does become worth it for mass production.

I was thinking to have it produced by elecrow and sell on their page so you could order complete set from their page. Would you be interested?

Actually I am looking for the Asian frequency band and this model isnt the actual one I need. Do you have any information about the other frequency module. Secondly have you practically tries making it and Is it working with TTN?

No? Really? If you look at details Elecrow offer two builds - 868 and 915, these cover wider ranges and the 915 is speced for the AS band (details will be down to ā€˜whichā€™ AS band and then how configured when setting up and managed TX via LNS):

Each module page has link to other module option, with DanMan just happening to link to the EU868 buildā€¦

My region is AS923 not sure if itā€™ll work. But according to the datasheet it can go upto 928Mhz covering that range. Do you think it wount be any issue

For EU citizens, there are multiple EU vendors that have the WM1302 (the Seeed version of the module) in stock at prices between 35 and 40 euro including VAT. Saves the hassle of dealing with import duties (and handling cost).

Note: some of these modules donā€™t include the sx1262 used for LBT (not used by the code anyway if I interpret the GitHub comments correctly)

@danmaneu will you be sharing your PCB design files so interested parties can order PCBs at their favorite manufacturer?

Letā€™s get busy!


Edit: Doh! OK, my bad. But at worse thatā€™s an afternoons work to go a test board

My import calculator says that the break even quantity is around 10, expecting to pay ā‚¬37.17 if I bought them direct with delivery, VAT & admin.

But you can never beat someone holding local stock without you having to invest!


EDIT, finger trouble with order of digits in price - corrected

You can find it in my branch here: https://github.com/danielkucera/esxp1302/tree/minipcie/hardware_design/motherboard
It is just the original project imported to kicad and pcie connector added, use with caution.

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Just to clarify my question again. I wanted
To ask that the US915 having frequency range from 915-928Mhz divided in 8 channels and on uplink from 903-905 and downlink from 923-928 and on the other hand AS923 having uplink of 921-923 as uplink and 923 as downlink. So is it possible to use the US915 in Asia where I have uplink of 921-923 lying in band of downlink of us915. I mean to so will I be able to use the downlink of other us915 and donā€™t miss any data an Asian device 8channel of AS923?
Kindly help me in this before buying the module LR1302 and using in Asia.Without any data packets loss.

You are confusing the authorised channels with the physical specifications of a radio device.

And being somewhat disingenuous in hoping someone will give you reassurances here when only the vendor can really help.

Just buy a TTIG and be done with it.

would be causing issues not only for yourself but also for all other users in radio range

How can a gateway that only accepts data from nodes and then forwards that data to TTN servers harm other users? I know the same can be achieved by sending that data to an MQTT broker (instead TTN), but Iā€™m just curious what makes such a gateway dangerous.

By not listening on 47 of the 48 frequency/spreading factor combinations it should listen at. That means sporadic uplinks might be delivered to the backend but because a node randomly selects a frequency for transmission a lot of them will not be received.
Now combine this with ADR where the backend instructs a node to use a different spreading factor based on the packets that are forwarded by that non compliant device (I wonā€™t call it a gateway to avoid confusion). The new settings will result in no transmissions from the node being received by the backend. So effectively a denial of service for that node.
Would you like that to happen to your sensor data?

Dangerous??

How do you go from ā€œissuesā€ (an important topic or problem for debate or discussion) to ā€œdangerousā€ (able or likely to cause harm or injury). [Definitions from Google]

Looks good.

From what I can gather, it uses the legacy UDP forwarder protocol? Is this correct? Do you know if there is any plans to use/add the more secure/authenticated basicstation protocol?

What is the background of the project? I note all the source files have copyright notices from Semtech and one of the main contributors, Dennis Deng has an email address @semtech. Is this a Semtech side project? What resources are Semtech providing?

Yes, packet forwarder.
The rest of the questions need to be asked elsewhere.

Semtech published the reference PF software on GitHub a long long time ago. Others have used it in various ways. Most reuse requires leaving copyright notices in place, just like millions of other OS projects. So Iā€™m not sure thereā€™s any benefit in inferring anything about Semtechā€™s involvement in this project or indeed any other gateway that uses it, which is vanishingly close to 100%.