LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?

[bmarkus]

@JF002 said in LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?:

I'm a bit confused about LORA/LORAWAN. With the current state of the firmware, is it possible to create a "LORAWAN" gateway on one Lopy, and connect another Lopy in LORAWAN mode to it?

I know that it won't be fully compliant with LORAWAN or TTN because of the single channel limitation, but I would like to do some tests, and I have no LORAWAN gateway in range...

Thanks!

A LoRaWAN GW is just a dumb device, network functions are provided by the network server. A GW without network server is useless.

[borjam]

@JF002 said in LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?:

I'm a bit confused about LORA/LORAWAN. With the current state of the firmware, is it possible to create a "LORAWAN" gateway on one Lopy, and connect another Lopy in LORAWAN mode to it?

I know that it won't be fully compliant with LORAWAN or TTN because of the single channel limitation, but I would like to do some tests, and I have no LORAWAN gateway in range...

If it't not fully compliant, it's not a LoRaWAN gateway. Period. The limitation is not only the single channel reception (at least three channels are mandatory en Europe, see the regional parameters document from the LoRa Alliance). And a LoRaWAN gateway needs to receive several different spreading factors simultaneously.

But it you just want to create a diy network you can use a Pycom device as a "gateway". It will be limited to a single frequency and a single SF.

That's what the nano-gateway example shows.

[JF002]

@borjam, bmarkus Thanks for these informations.

Indeed, I want to create a DIY network, only for my devices, for experimentations and tests.
But is it possible to connect a true LORAWAN device to this nano-gateway? I suppose I'll need to configure them so that they use the same channel/frequency/sf/whatever than my nano-gateway.
Is is possible to create such a LORAWAN node with the Lopy?

[bmarkus]

@JF002 said in LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?:

@borjam, bmarkus Thanks for these informations.

Indeed, I want to create a DIY network, only for my devices, for experimentations and tests.
But is it possible to connect a true LORAWAN device to this nano-gateway? I suppose I'll need to configure them so that they use the same channel/frequency/sf/whatever than my nano-gateway.
Is is possible to create such a LORAWAN node with the Lopy?

Read previous posts. It is not clear what do you want to reach. What are the "true LoraWAN devices": Probably you can hack. But than they are not true LoraWAN devices anymore.

What is about the network server?

Really, please forget LoPy or any other SX127x based devices as a LoRaWAN gateway.

You can build fine networks with them, there are academic opensource projects using LoRa devices with a different networking protocol. Yes, it is possible, but need a different protocol stack.

But please, do not call it LoRaWAN which is a standardized network architecture and protocol.

[borjam]

@JF002 said in LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?:

@borjam, bmarkus Thanks for these informations.

Indeed, I want to create a DIY network, only for my devices, for experimentations and tests.
But is it possible to connect a true LORAWAN device to this nano-gateway? I suppose I'll need to configure them so that they use the same channel/frequency/sf/whatever than my nano-gateway.
Is is possible to create such a LORAWAN node with the Lopy?

There are no true or half true LoRaWAN (or even π % true) devices. There are LoRaWAN devices and non LoRaWAN devices.

It is not possible to build a LoRaWAN gateway with a LoPy, period. It can't listen on multiple channels nor multiple SFs simultaneously. So, if you need a gateway for LoRaWAN devices it will certainly not work.

If you want to build a network with raw LoRa devices (for example, LoRa cards available for the Raspberry Pi or Arduino and Lopy) it should work. It may take some experimentation due to documentation confusion. Actually I am going to do some tests with LoPy and a card for Raspberry and Arduino from "Dragino".

As far as I know, LoRaWAN nodes are required to choose a frequency at random out of a minimum of three channels. Even if you set up three LoPys, one on each frequency, you would still need to listen to several different SFs. The kludge is not worth the effort.

[JF002]

@borjam Ok, I understand, thank you!
Here's what I would like to try : I have 2 Lopy boards. I've already managed to create a little program that is able to connect to a TTN gateway. This is then a LoRaWAN device.
I would like to continue my experimentations on LoRaWAN and TTN, but I don't have any gateway in range at home, and I don't own one.
Could it be possible to slightly modify the little "client" program I used to connect to TTN so that it connects to the other Lopy board, that would act like a nano-gateway (the client and the nano-gateway would still exchange LoRaWAN packets, except for the channel/frequency negociation).

I know that a standard LoRaWAN device wouldn't be able to connect to my nano-gateway, but it could allow me to continue my experiments.

If I understood correctly, I would have to force the device to use the same frequency, channel, sf than the nano-gateway, but I don't know if it's possible with the current firmware (or possible at all).

Thanks!

[gertjanvanhethof]

@JF002 I'm trying to implement this right now.
One LoPy acts as LoRaWAN node and connects to a second LoPy nano-gateway.
The LoPy nano-gateway isn't able to talk to the TTN API's yet: you need to implement http://www.grpc.io/ on the LoPy.
grpc have a Python library but I don't know yet if LoPy can run this.
I working on this and will try this during Christmas holiday.
An alternative is to implement grpc on an Raspberry Pi and use that for the TTN connectivity. So connecting the LoPy nano-gateway to RPi.

[jellium]

Hi @bmarkus,
Do you feel like the LoPy is getting better as far as LoRa and LoRaWAN (single channel nano-gateway or endpoint) are concerned?
Thanks for your clarifications.

[gertjanvanhethof]

@jellium I don't know what you mean. This topic is going about a nano-gateway connected to TTN and a LoRa node connected to the nano-gateway. So two LoPy dev boards.
Connection to a full LoRaWAN gateway (by the same LoRa node) is working fine. The problem occurs when using the nano-gateway.

[jellium]

@gertjanvanhethof said in LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?:

@jellium I don't know what you mean. This topic is going about a nano-gateway connected to TTN and a LoRa node connected to the nano-gateway. So two LoPy dev boards.
Connection to a full LoRaWAN gateway (by the same LoRa node) is working fine. The problem occurs when using the nano-gateway.

I was reacting to a post from @bmarkus which was written 6 months ago:

@bmarkus said in LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?:

Actually LoPy is not a matured solution. Hope it will be but it will take 6 mionths or so if ever will get documentation and a working LoRaWAN stack as I see.

I just received a LoPy device which I am starting to play with, with updated firmware and software. Therefore I was wondering how the judgment of @bmarkus evolved taking into account the recent releases and evolutions of LoPy.

[bmarkus]

Please read previous mails. It is not possible to create a LoraWAN base station (gateway) using SX127x chips, so it is valid for for LoPy too. Nothing wrong with Lopy, it is just a device. If you are in doubt, read LoRaWAN Specification.

[gertjanvanhethof]

@bmarkus Yes that is correct. Only a LoRa Nano-Gateway is possible. This is not compliant with LoRaWAN. But for development and without a full compliant gateway this is ok. So you can develop LoRa Nodes which connects to your own Nano-Gateway.

[bmarkus]

@gertjanvanhethof said in LoPy as LoRaWAN Basestation?:

@bmarkus Yes that is correct. Only a LoRa Nano-Gateway is possible. This is not compliant with LoRaWAN. But for development and without a full compliant gateway this is ok. So you can develop LoRa Nodes which connects to your own Nano-Gateway.

It is OK, but the original subject of the topic is "LoPy as LoraWAN Basestation?" Using LoRa radio layer you can make great things with other protocols, see http://www.waziup.eu/ as an example building network with SX127x devices and gateways only. But not LoraWAN.