Collecting and Saving data from FiPy

[Jana Koteich]

Hey everyone,

I have a project were I should scan for wifi, Bluetooth and LoRa.
The FiPy will scan for about 5 to 6 hours and collect the received beacons. After that I most take the collected data and process it.

In this case what would be the best way to save and retrieve the data (flash/local storage, use SD card...)

Thank you in advance.
Jana

[jcaron]

@Jana-Koteich passive detection of a public LoRAWAN gateway is quite difficult and unreliable.

The only cases when a gateway transmits are:

• join accept, which should be quite rare
• confirmed uplink ack
• data or MAC downlink

Public networks often limit a lot confirmed uplinks and downlinks so they should be relatively rare as well.

Depending on the region and various network and device settings the probability you can find a channel / data rate to listen on with a decent chance of catching those downlinks is variable. But even if you catch one of those it is quite unlikely you will be able to guess if that network is public or private IMHO.

[Jana Koteich]

@jcaron Thanks for the clarification :)
I have scanned for WiFi and BLE (and yes I am receiving dozens of BLE per second). For LoRa I haven't started yet with the code and I am new to to this technology but I knew as you mentioned that there is no beacons, so I will be listening to a specific channel or at least try to detect the presence of public LoRa gateways (still I don't know how far is this possible, and from your words I can guess it's not practical).

Thanks again for your help.

[jcaron]

@Jana-Koteich not an answer to your question, but note that except in the case of the little used class B (which I’m not even sure is supported), there are no beacons in LoRa, and no way to scan for anything. You can only listen on a specific channel/data rate combination and see if by chance someone else uses the same, and you probably won’t learn much from it. So unless you have your own scheme with your own beacons you won’t be able to gather much information about LoRa networks in the vicinity.

For WiFi and BLE you’ll probably need to do some local processing, otherwise you’ll end up with quite a lot of data, especially in urban environments. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could receive dozens of BLE advertisements per second. Keeping track of “I’ve seen this MAC or SSID” probably leads to very different amounts of data compared to “I record every single advertisement”.