Switching Frequency Plan on RAK831/Balena install

Gateways Raspberry Pi Gateways
1

Hi All,

A guy I am helping out has a RAK831/Rapsberry Pi setup working well on AU915 using Balena. (using @kersing’s Multi Protocol (MP) Packet Forwarder)

He ordered some off the shelf temp/hum nodes that he now realises operates on AS923.

I believe the hardware should be capable of switching over, but where do I have to change settings?

On the TTN console I simply changed the frequency plan (on meshed) to AS920-923

But get this error

ERROR: [main] failed to start the concentrator

and it never starts after resetting.

Am I missing a step?

Is the hardware not capable?

cheers
Paul

2

Could it be this?

3

Yes, AS923 with the MP packet forwarder and RAK831 doesn’t work. You must disable LBT, then it should be fine.

4

I tried the disabling LBT by inserting those lines into run.py at 191 but it had no effect.

Restarted and rebooted just in case, but same error.

Switching back to AU915 and it all runs again.

Any other ideas?

@tuftec I see you have/had a RAK831 running on AS923, what was your setup?

cheers
Paul

5

Are you sure you correctly pushed the balena image and then deployed it to your device? Did you check your log to see if it printed “Removing LBT configuration” during startup ?

I have 3x RAK831 gateways working fine on AS923 with this change.

6

Actually I used the terminal within Balena to insert the lines with nano.

Won’t that work also or have I stuffed up?

(I am trying minimal impact stuff at the moment because the gateway is 450km away)

cheers
Paul

7

@paul I just used the original packet forwarder that comes with the standard RAK831 setup.
I found that the AS923 band plan was pretty easy to setup and worked well.

I will try to send a PM with my conf file.

8

I’m not 100% sure how the balena system works here, so I’m not sure if it would automatically override your changes with those from your image. I’d try looking in the console to see if that line is printed; if it isn’t, your changes didn’t stick.

9

OK changes don’t stick, must be recopied each time from some repository.

We modified the version of run.py with those extra lines on the local hard drive and did the update via these lines as per the readme

git add .
git commit -m "Updated gateway version"
git push -f balena master

Then what? (sorry complete git/linux/balena noob here)

Even if you could point me to a resource that guides me through it, can’t seem to find what should happen

thanks in advance

Paul

10

See here for a guide: https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/getting-started/raspberrypi3/nodejs/

It’s not exactly the same, but it is roughly similar to what you are doing.

Once you push the code to git, you should be able to just reboot the device and it will re-provision. It might even do it automatically without rebooting, not sure.

11

No need to reboot, the device will pull the new image and start it automatically after some time.

Paul, do you see a new build cycle starting at the push? It should end with ascii graphics if successful.

12

Thanks guys,

I did the same procedure on my balena application and it worked fine, so for some reason his isn’t updating properly.

He is currently rebuilding it from scratch with the additions to run.py from the start.

cheers
Paul

13

Hi,
I haven’t used Balena, and don’t know how to change the frequency in it.
But for RAK831 + Raspberry Pi, i have released an fully open source project on Github https://github.com/RAKWireless/RAK831-LoRaGateway-RPi
In this project, people can change the frequency by replace the global_config.json file which you can find in the folder </opt/ttn-gateway/packet_forwarder/lora_pkt_fwd>.
All the global_config.json files which point various frequencies can be found on Github:
https://github.com/RAKWireless/RAK-global_conf
In my global_config.json file of AS923, i have set the LBT like this(set “enable” to “false”):
image

Maybe you can use this project for testing.
Note: If you get an error like this:
“ERROR: [main] failed to start the concentrator”
you can try to reduce the SPI rate from 8M to 2M, and try again.

14

Thanks @fomi we had actually tried that unsuccessfully following the instructions on the RAK831 git site.

They neglected to add that you need to change the global_conf.json file

So we used an AS923 example provided by @tuftec and were up and running in minutes.

Now we have the off the shelf sensors working as well as some LMIC nodes working well and reporting through to Cayenne.

thanks for everyone’s help

cheers
Paul

15

Hi, everyone!
I’ve released a newest software for RAK831, RAK2245 Pi Hat, and RAK7243 without LTE, and it is based on Raspbian OS:


In this software, i developed a config UI for users to change frequency, LoRa server, and WiFi very simply. Now, you only need to type a command , and will not have a mistake of configuration.
Just have a look as follow:
image
image
image

1 Like
16

Looks good and should make things easier

Link doesn’t work for me - is this the correct one

RAK2245-RAK831-LoRaGateway-RPi-Raspbian-OS

cheers
Paul

17

I’m sorry, @Paul_Stewart

I’ve made a mistake.:slight_smile:
The link is correct now.

Thank you!

18

All information about RAK831, RAK2245 Pi Hat, and RAK7243 (LTE) which is called Pilot Gateway Pro too, including images, source codes, docs, you can find all of them here:

I’ll update this topic continuously, just focus on it. :slight_smile:

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