Has anyone looked into running custom firmware on the LG01-N from Dragino? I know it won’t make a good gateway as it’s only single channel, but as an IP-enabled LoRaWAN node/sensor, it could be an interesting fit…
I’m thinking of the use case where some kind of bridge is required, for example from BacNet/IP to LoRaWAN.
Section 5.2 and beyond of the user manual has a whole host of examples, no custom firmware required!
Interesting - so direct radio chipset communication is possible. As most of the examples focus on vanilla LoRa opposed to LoRaWAN, I guess I’d need to mix in the rest of the protocol handling.
What are you hoping to build?
If you want remote devices using LoRa to relay to one of these boxes, if it’s got internet, why send it via MQTT to a data collection server.
In theory you could LoRa to LoRa on the LG01 and then send the data on as LoRaWAN to hit a gateway - so it acts as a local repeater, but it may be easier to put the gateway antenna on a longer pole.
Not sure, but my reading was that they’d have devices on a local, isolated Ethernet subnet which the box would collect information from and then acting as a node uplink that via a LoRaWAN.
But then there was an observation that the node-ish examples for the box were raw LoRa examples and not LoRaWAN examples, so a node-side LoRaWAN stack would be needed to create suitable packets maintain state, etc even if the more raw radio part was already there.
Ah, yes, I see, the only time I’ve had a non-internet connected Ethernet network to collect data we killed the 2G uplink with the data volume, so hadn’t really ever though of piping ethernet devices in to LoRaWAN.
But still a box with many possibilities.
All one needs is a pygate concentrator board and some 8-10 cm jumper wires and it could even be a gateway…
Actually, there is another possibility, too, which would take some cleverness, but if one set it up some moderate distance away from a gateway, sent the occasional uplink packet to figure out a clock difference, and then delegated all of a companion real gateway’s transmit requests to it over Ethernet instead, the real gateway wouldn’t have to stop receiving any time there was a downlink. But it gets harder in a frequency plan where channels are used for both uplink and downlink vs. being segregated into different parts of a band.
In theory, but just in theory at this stage, a BacNet IP to LoRaWAN bridge. I figured a gateway was a good place to start as they have both of the components required to build such a thing already:
I’ve had no end of troubles getting the LG01 to connect to TTN - I’d be quite wary of this setup.
We wouldn’t dare suggest such a dreadful idea as single channel gateways connected to TTN are sewer rats waiting to bite the network where it hurts.
This idea, now I’ve got the hang of it, is to use the box as a LoRaWAN device, collecting data from it’s Ethernet port.
Of course - I too wouldn’t considering using one of these as a gateway, however it could be an interesting platform for an IP-enabled LoRaWAN node. Not all BacNet IP devices are connected to a WAN, so this could easily enable a number of otherwise disconnected BacNet IP devices to communicate to a centralised LoRaWAN-based application.