My first frustration is that I can’t seem to find out if there is actually a gateway in my neighborhood that I can connect to. Is there a way I can detect this with this module? I couldn’t find any information on it.
On the coverage maps of TTN, there is some activity in my neighborhood according to the heatmaps. Although I couldn’t find specific data for my street, I’m confident that there should be coverage as I’m not living on an island.
So, my initial priority is to determine if there is coverage in my area.
Once I have that information, I may need some assistance in getting the LORA-board connected.
The Wio-E5 module will not tell you if there is coverage. Unlike WiFi gateways do not broadcast telling anyone near there is a gateway.
If you share where you are we might be able to help to determine if there should be any coverage. Without exact location information that isn’t possible.
This is a common issue with people starting out with LoRaWAN, hoping that a mapped gateway is close enough, with the same answer spread across the forum - the frequently quoted maximum range(s) of LoRa are exactly that, maximum under marketing aka ideal conditions. Some gateways are so poorly wired they only hear signals from a few 100m away. Some are on the top of tower blocks and hear for miles, but get turned off when the user is on holiday. So the gateway map is useful, but in no way does it mean you will be heard, even on the same street.
That said, LoRa is line of sight, so 10km is entirely doable if you have a good setup.
You’ll also see that almost no developer ever debugged any of their projects efficiently without access to a gateway console on TTN and that effectively means you own a gateway. So you should start keeping this in the back of your mind.
As above, knowing where you are - just the city & country will suffice - can give us some clues in providing advice. Otherwise it’s as simple as getting a laptop and parking up on the street where there looks like a likely active gateway and hoping Special Forces or a Noisy Neighbour don’t pass by & wonder what you are doing.
And to add to the signal coverage thing - gateways rarely transmit so there’s nothing to detect - the map is derived from devices transmitting. In theory you could detect the devices transmitting but it would required totally reprogramming the Wio and I’ve not seen any signal strength monitoring code for LoRaWAN based modules that can just be downloaded & applied. The simplest setup for a signal monitor is a gateway as it will log all the packets it hears. But we don’t do mobile gateways as they cause problems to the network.
Actually no, unlikely! Get yourself a cheap GW for development per Nick’s suggestion.
I’ve driven around your area a few times over the years…indeed past Antwerp just last Monday!
The key point with your 'ish location is, if I recall, very low lying ground north of Merksem, with the area approximately around Hof de Bist and Donk barely 0-3 or 4 m above sea-level. There is a distant GW N.East but likely that will be masked for you by the higher (10-20m higher) ground around Brasschaat. The closer GW’s to south and east in Antwerp proper will almost certainly be masked by the elevated roadways and building clutter in between. The A/E roads are typically elevated (Leugenberg to Antwerp Nord to Kliene Bareel junctions) - as are the rail lines to east and south of you and with shallow angles to your area almost certainly masked. One can get decent signals along these transprt routes - see below for one I grabbed last week. Drop either side however and coverage rapidly fails. Close in to Antwerp on the E17, A12, E313/E34, E19 is good but to the outside of these spokes and ring road its challenged.
I’m not living in the “villa sanctuary” of Brasschaat, I don’t earn enough for that.
I guess I need to buy a small gateway myself or look for another technology to play around with.
Too bad, my goal was to test the LORAwan technology but now I need to save some more money to get a GW.
The beams aren’t real - they are a line between a one off signal between device and the gateway - if you don’t have line of sight of a gateway, you don’t get a “beam”. Unless it rains, then you can sometimes see them, loverly colourful arches.
You may want to consider a perspective shift here - LoRaWAN doesn’t need testing, it’s more about you learning what its capabilities are and then applying them appropriately. As above, you are not the first and will not be the last person to come unstuck by not having a gateway. A TTIG is around €90 and will get you started but as you’ve not given any indication of what you want to achieve, all advice would be generic.
As to ‘another technology’, if you need ‘long range’* low power radio for sensors, LoRaWAN is pretty much unbeatable. Otherwise you are looking at less than 100m for a typical radio or you pay for a SIM on mobile. If you are doing anything with radio comms, learning the basics of how it propagates at the difference frequency bands, antennas, signal strength, RSSI, legal issues etc are a very good idea and will save you from buying in to something that may not achieve what you are looking for.
‘long range’ in LoRa translates to line of sight with no significant obstructions in the Fresnel zone for km’s or 100’s of meters in an urban area, just maybe 1-2km or more than WiFi can do in a building of normal construction.
Tell us what you were trying to do and we can point you in the right direction …
What am I trying to do? Perhaps you’ve read it above: “test the LoRaWAN technology”…
I have designed several connected devices that are up and running.
I have several LoRa-connected devices that send me data about things I want to monitor (using E32-868T30D boards). I forgot which MCU I’ve used (PIC/AVR??), but they are just LoRa, not LoRaWAN.
These devices have been performing their jobs really well for several years in outdoor conditions.
I have also designed several “nodes” that send me data via MQTT (Thingspeak) through Wi-Fi. They also work well, but even with ESP32 in deep sleep, they consume their batteries very quickly. WIFI is very power consuming.
So, I want to combine these technologies: long range and low power, to design my own nodes. No, not existing nodes, but my own stuff!
Otherwise, I could design a LoRa to MQTT converter module, but I believe using LoRaWAN will solve most of my problems.
Therefore, I simply want to test Things Network and the possibility to resend received data with MQTT.
However, all of this will only be possible if I find the right way to send/receive data via LoRaWAN.
And for this, I need coverage.
€90 for the TTIG? I couldn’t find the TTIG for that price.
If your comparing and testing the various technologies, then be aware that most all TTN\LoRaWAN setups operate within legal power limits so 14dBm @ 868Mhz.
If I recall correctly the E32-868T30D cannot be set below 20dBm and defaults 30dBm (1 watt).
I think the docs explain this pretty well as one of the integrations - and if you’ve got LoRa nodes running then you know that they can do low power with some reasonable range.
So this all comes down to investing in the technology to save you time and money. Community gateway use is about community stuff, like air quality or water levels in rivers etc, if you want to design a suite of devices to use LoRaWAN then having your own gateway comes with the territory.
Haven’t looked myself at details but if Stuart’s comment is correct wrt device operating limits then you wont be compliant/legal if you dont use an attenuator directly connected at the module or run with a -6dbi (that minus 6 not +6dbi as often called out on the Forum!) antenna Actually -4 ok as the oft quoted 14dbm EU limit assumes use with a 2dbi ant!
Hi, My name is Dhyan and I am a Robotics Undergraduate student from the University of Plymouth. I am new to LORA and LORAWAN and I recently picked up a Grove - Wio-E5 and I plan to use it with a XIAO ESP32S3 and the XIAO Expansion Board. So I followed the steps found on this: https://github.com/andresoliva/LoRa-E5?tab=readme-ov-file and I received Current DevEui: +ID: DevEui, 2C:F7:F1:20:51:00:46:C8 as my output. I have setup a TTN application with the DevEui key I received. I think I have input everything into the application fine however I am confused on why I am not receiving an output of the data being sent to the TTN. Any help regarding this would be much appreciated. I am running the Grove-Wio-E5-Basic program and I should be receiving an output “I am sending this message to a LoRa Gateway” just as a dummy test.
Have you checked what triple is required for a successful join? (Hint, you need to fill out/generate all three values when creating a new device in the console)
Are you sure all three values in the console match the ones in the device?
You are new to the technology so you won’t be able to judge the state of the example however take it from a long time user, that is an extremely bad example of LoRaWAN usage.
The interval between transmissions is far too short to be legal (as in authorities become involved) and certainly violates the TTN fair use policy
The example uses acknowledged uplinks which do not scale in LoRaWAN and should never be used without good reason. And in TTN you are limited to 10 a day, however for a scalable network you should think in terms of 10 a month. Avoid any use of Transfer…WithAcknowledged.
Hi, Sorry yes I am new to all of this and my goal is to have a water quality monitoring station with a bunch of sensors and through the use of the LoRaWAN network I keep the data sent back once a day / once a week. I am unsure what I need to even set this I am using this tutorial as a guide however this didn’t even detect the device. I just wanted a simple setup to send around 6 sensor data values
If you are starting, the Learn section (see top of the page when looking at the first message of a topic) has a section on the LoRaWAN basics (including an 1 hour basic introduction) that is very helpful to get a grip on the basics.
Hi I am unsure what the OTAA triple is can you clarify this a bit more. And I am currently watching that video. I am also just trying to understand how to interface the mcu with the module
