TTN Console gateway traffic and device data only sporadic

[unFabricated (Jan P.)]

Hello,

@kersing

You are thinking WiFi. In LoRaWAN a node connects to the network.

@kersing the word connect is probably wrong, I should have said my GW can receive my node. Which was very important for me to know because I could very quickly figure out the frequency plan must be set wrong in the source code. Also SPI bus pin mapping for the LoRa module was not so straight fwd and seeing that my GW can receive my node helped to know the radio as such works. Did I not have that access to the GW I would have struggled a lot longer.

@kersing

That policy has been created to grant every device a fair allowance of airtime without monopolizing it. It also means a device only uses a fair amount of the shared backend infrastructure which TTN provides for free.

I am in a location so far away from any urban center or population center I doubt that will ever be an issue. If TTN had an option for a paid service I would be more than happy to pay, I am not one that expects everything for free.

@kersing

Keep in mind there is absolutely no guarantee the downlink will get to your node. Or that it gets there in a timely manner. LoRaWAN class A (what most people and devices use and certainly the only option in the version of the TTN backend you are using) is not a good match for control applications.

My expectation are low, I don’t intend to control anything that could have serious consequences if there is a break down in communication.

@descartes

This isn’t a thing with OTAA as it resets the counter for you with the join accept.

I did not imply that OTAA as such is the issue, as I had stated above the example code found on the internet that comes with the lmic (various versions of lmic) libraries has never worked for me out of the box. So that issue relates to getting OTAA to work in the 1st place on my MC. Expectation where that this would solve the counter issue. Now that I have OTAA working on my MC and tried to reboot the node I see that OTAA is a solution for the issue I had originally when this topic started.

I am aiming to have approx 10 bytes of payload send every 5 minutes. Obviously trying that with my temporary setup here at home wont be any use. I will deploy my GW 1st to a suitable mountain site and then just give that a shot. Since the airtime is part of the meta data I should be able to calculate very easy if I am within reasonable limits.

@descartes

You may benefit from the following:

Read all of:https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/
The devices section of: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/devices/
The gateways section of: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/gateways/
The network section of: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/network/
The applications and API sections of: https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/applications/

I did read some of the information on accessing my data via MQTT and looked at the API reference to see how the payload is encoded. I tend to google for the buzz words that come to mind if I have an issue and if I do so TTN sources rarely show up. Except my failure to correlate “No data for device” to having an issue caused with ABP and the counter not resetting. I actually have no problem with LoRa or TTN, the most grief I have is so far MC and compiler related. I have not come across any information from TTN that would have helped there and I would not expect that TTN would be able to help. There are just to many badly build and documented MC boards out there.

Anyway, I was in the end able to compile the firmware for my MC and have OTAA working on a test node. This fixes my original problem thanks to the suggestions you guys made.

All happy on my end. Looking fwd to put my GW on a mountain site and run a test node for a few days. Should be there by next WE latest.

Have FuN!
Jan P.

PS: REALLY ? I can not reply now because I am new here ?!?!? “You’ve reached the maximum number of replies a new user can create on their first day. Please wait 56 minutes before trying again.” You are definitely going over board !!