With the requirements the move to TTN V3 brings to correctly implement MAC command parsing, such a low memory board isn’t advisable at all.
I use Dragino LDS01. They are rather cheap and easy to install.
Thanks for the info everyone. Looks like I will go for the door sensor. Is it easy to set up basic connect to my lora gateway?
imho it is very easy. Just remove the isolation from the battery and it will start joining. Additionally I would recommend RTFM.
I would get a Heltec CudeCell. They have done a good job making example code it’s got lithium and solar posibilities and it’s running the latest chipset and it’s utlra low power.
Nope, neither would I, but it fulfils the OP’s criteria, even if the criteria wasn’t ideal IMHO: Spend a few pennies more and get something that works now & in the future - like the Adafruit Feather
Found the quote:
“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When
you pay too much, you lose a little money - that’s all. When you pay
too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you
bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The
common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a
lot - it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well
to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will
have enough to pay for something better.”
John Ruskin
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Not sure it could be any simpler really!
I got a device that was supposed to be that easy too but after week(ends) of trying to get it to work I gave up, it needed to be configured via specially crafted (poorly documented) messages that I needed to send to it via lora. Never got it to work, it just kept on joining. What I took away from this experience was that if it doesn’t have a port on it to put your own software into it (or an example) then you might do yourself a disservice… unless you absolutly only ever want to see if a door is open. If that is the total sum of what you want from your lora network then for sure grab that. The Heltech CubeCell AB-01 dropped in price the past weeks now around €10. If you are just starting I would take the AB-02 under concideration for the intigrated oled display for a couple bucks more.
Different people, different skills and different requirements. If you simply need a node to fulfill a simple task and one is available that does so, no need to spend time learning to program it. (With the risk of not getting it right and getting frustrated about that)
Any LoRaWAN configuration message to the node can only be sent after it joined so sounds like you were having a chicken and egg problem.
I believe that is exactly what I said Jac. If the OP only ever wants to see if a door is open then of course, spend money on that. I speak of my personal experience. I find closed source “plug-n-pray” type things are more frustrating than open designs with a large user base and documentation.
De door sensor is about the same price as a Heltec, but the Heltech is much more useful and flexible. The example software for the Heltech and start-up guides are accurate and helpful to get started sucessfully. The OP wanted a node to generate data, but that probably isn’t the purpose of the endevour… just generating traffic for traffic’s sake.
That is you. Many people find Arduino mini+RFM95+LMIC (all open) incredible frustrating and hard to get working right.
The door sensor works within TTN specs out of the box. The Heltec stuff uses acknowledged uplinks exhausting the TTN downlink allowance in no time at all. Requests to fix the default setting seem not to be heard.
Their Arduino core is closed and can’t be used on other devices as it requires a magic license.
A better choice? Well in some cases it might be, everyone if free to decide for themselves.
In some cases it is, they’re called canary devices and are used to monitor the gateway and/or integrations. In those cases traffic is all you want.
In this case the OP was looking for a device to check the gateway is working so traffic is just what he is looking for.
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Yes just want something simple to check gateway is working. What sort of range should I be getting on stick 5db antenna outside?
It is nearly impossible to predict the range without knowing your environment. One thing I can say is, that an antenna outside on the roof gives you a larger coverage than an indoor antenna.
Have a look at TTNmapper, then you get an impression what coverage can be possible.
Would absolutely agree. Bugs in code you have access to get fixed, so once a project is mature, the remaining bugs are in the propriety parts you can’t fix.
I haven’t tried it, but my impression is that the Dragino door sensor isn’t really much different from their development kit, eg, you can make your own firmware for it using the development kit sources, only that is not officially supported.
The Heltech CubeCell AB-01 dropped in price the past weeks now around €10.
Indeed, and you can change the underlying LoRaWan stack. That said, Heltic is being silly with their $uper$ectret bootloader and apparently disabling the SWD pins by promptly putting them in some other mode. It would be nice not to have to use the hardware under the absurdities of Arduino. Nor is that doing them any good as it’s quite easy to dump the information they’re trying to “protect” from Arduino code.
Jac, I’ve odrdered this Heltec ones cause I thought it was open and compatible.
From your comment I am thinking i was wrong in recomending them or even buying it myself. These incorrect settings you reffer to… can they be fixed or have I just tossed money down the drain?
Ever heard of “the guy with the Swiss accent” Andreas Spiess? His review of this board didn’t mention anthing about needing a special license to use them or incorrect default settings.
I though they would compatible with the arduino IDE and without any code on them.
oh and… what are SWD pins?
The hardware you ordered is Arduino IDE compatible and can be programmed without having to worry about the SWD pins with a serial connection. The hardware should be programmed with the magic license required for Arduino usage if it is genuine Heltec hardware. (They want to protect their investment and I think they are going about it the wrong way but being Chinese they probably know what lengths copy cats go to to sell comparable hardware cheaper)
The wrong settings referred to are easily fixed when creating your own LoRaWAN program. Just make sure to select unconfirmed messages in the settings before compiling.
Our issue with the hardware is that it is presented as being open but to to able to use it you rely on a binary blob for Arduino compatibility and the development environment available for it defaults to the wrong settings.
A deal breaker? Not necessarily as long as you are aware of these limitations and take into account it is not as open and transparent as the advertising suggests.
SWD pins are used for low level programming and debugging when no bootloader is available,
In particular, they’d be very helpful to use it in a professional non-Arduino development flow.
In theory it’s probably possible to do enough archeology on their Arduino BSP (which is open source) to figure out how to talk to their bootloader, but…
Between the Heltec only working under Arduino, and some of the RAK stuff being an online compiler or figure it out from scratch, it’s sad that a lot of these companies seem to only be targeting hobby/proof of concept situations, and not professional deployments.
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I wonder @Jonthan if you’d like to tell us what your accent is. Andreas has a Swiss accent because he’s Swiss. His name would have been sufficient.
Andreas has a lot of experience and may not have noticed that some things wouldn’t be so simple for a beginner. I haven’t watched his video on this product, did he use Arduino or the original SDK?
A brief 10 second search of the forum would reveal that there are plenty of fans of the Heltec range, indeed I have several of their modules, but also there are a fair few support issues raised.
If you want to go DIY then the Adafruit Feather M0 with RFM95 is, well, an Adafruit offering with all the support infrastructure that comes with their products and is a primary supported board for the MCCI LMiC LoRaWAN stack, the best regarded implementation for Arduino. Even that comes with a range of support issues but mostly are related to RTFM or knowledge related to bytes in the payload, which is documented in the TTN docs, so that’s an RTFM issue too.
@descartes That’s how Andreas introduces every video… it is a direct quote and not some sort of slight against him. I have watched pretty much every video he ever put out, big fan.
He used arduino ide in the video and far as I can see it is an easy peasy install to get it running, even for a beginner. I heve been browsing their forums over at Heltec though and I see their engineers in the threads promissing to fix some library bugs that folks have pointed out to them.
I’ve done the diy route, soldering RFM modules onto the break out PCBs ment for the ESP8266 and using level shifters to put it on a 5v arduino. That was a couple years ago though, thankfully we dont have to resort to that anymore. I have been waiting for affordable modules with wifi and solar so I can geek out on my bees and they are starting to show up more and more.