I couldn’t find any documentation for installing Semtech Packet forwarder in Microchip’s LoRa gateway (Included with the LoRa Tech evaluation kit 800). Can anyone help if it is really possible?
That is not possible. The firmware provided by Microchip is the only software that runs on it.
However the Microchip software implements the same protocol so there should not be a need to install the Semtech packet forwarder.
1 Like
To expand on the above, this is an MCU-based gateway, and while such can be a very sound and robust design, MCU implementations typically require a lot of hardware-specific tuning compared to Embedded Linux implementations where relatively little work is needed to adapt any standard source to the platform (since Linux is supposed to handle the SPI, typically only configuring the GPIO in separate script which resets the concentrator chip)
For most purposes you can probably just use Microchip’s software as already suggested.
If someone has this hardware and considers it orphaned from their needs, another option could be to separate the radio and core cards. The 28 pin connector which links them has documented signals, and those signals are the same as would be found connector any other brand of SPI-based concentrator to a host system. So you could take the radio deck and wire it some suitable embedded Linux platform with SPI, basically by following the directions for doing so with any other make of concentrator (IC880, RAK831, etc) and simply making an appropriate (short!) wiring harness.
Presumably there’s also enough detail in documentation to make a new custom firmware for the MCU, but that’s likely to be a big project - you not only have to juggle the concentrator code, but dealing with IP networking on an MCU can be a real headache. Port the packet forwarder from pthreads to FreeRTOS, wrangle LWiP in there too, it can be done, but will have many frustrating quirks to overcome. Such a project would likely only make sense if you had a lot of them and couldn’t get source access from the vendor to customize their version.