IoT slide deck 2024-09 Update

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Here is the update of my IoT slide collection, which now approaches 400 slides that you are free to reuse. In this new edition, you will find technical elements on Meshtastic, Mioty, DePin, LoRa updates throughout, and a few introductory slides on blockchains. However, on this point, my new deck, published a few days ago, is more relevant.

As usual, to go further, you can find video content on my Youtube channel, like my new MooC about Block Chain and my IoT MooC (long version) posted this year.

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Blockchain – Building digital trust

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In this course, I explore the transformative technology of blockchain, a revolutionary system that has redefined how we think about digital transactions and trust. Blockchain is more than just a buzzword in tech—it’s a secure, decentralized way to record, verify, and transfer data.

My goal is to help you understand the underlying technology behind blockchain, its key components, and the reasons it has become a cornerstone of digital trust. By eliminating intermediaries and ensuring transparency, blockchain allows for secure and immutable transactions. Throughout this training, I will explain how this technology works and how it creates an environment of trust in an increasingly digital world.

By the end of this course, you will have a clear understanding of the potential of blockchain and its applications, empowering you to use this technology with confidence.

Read more to get the slides

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Critical Analysis of the Meshtastic Protocol

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Meshtastic is a mesh protocol (peer-to-peer, network by proximity) based on LoRa technology. LoRa is not LoRaWan, just as WiFi is not IP. It is therefore possible to use LoRa for networks without infrastructure.

Meshtastic was designed for communication outside of any public infrastructure, with a survivalist spirit of autonomous and (more or less) secure communication.

Due to its structure, it is difficult to estimate the size of such a community, but the map seems to indicate that more than 10,000 nodes are currently active. However, it seems that there are actually around 40,000 active nodes, with strong participation from the global ham radio community. In practice, the network is composed of clusters of nodes communicating locally with each other and expanding as clusters become visible to one another. In reality, without linking infrastructure, it won’t be possible to connect from one cluster to another but some MQTT relay features exists.

The use and development of the network require very few resources, as simple DIY nodes based on widely available devkits, such as the T-beam, are sufficient. The user interface works via a mobile application interacting through Bluetooth. The investment is just a few dozen euros. In a previous Meshtastic blog post, I detailed its implementation with small LoRa modules.

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Meshtastic another way to use LoRa

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You may be familiar with LoRa, not that girl, but the LOng RAnge communication solution that is used for long-distance, low-power point-to-point communications. It was invented by the Grenoble-based company Cycleo in 2009 and later sold to the semiconductor giant Semtech.

You might have heard more about it in its usage with an infrastructured network: LoRaWan, which allows public or private networks to connect thousands of sensors. In this blog post, I am going to talk about another implementation of LoRa, this time in a mesh architecture named Meshtastic. Multiple mesh, LoRa based solution are rising, this is one of them.

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The Hidden Side of LoRa

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While I was working on a blog post about Meshtastic (which will be online soon), I started questioning the time on air in a non-LoRaWAN context, where the online simulators I usually use did not work. This led me to investigate the LoRa frame format (not LoRaWAN, just LoRa, the underlying layer), and to confront the “sync word”, the functioning of a chirp… a whole range of concepts for which I expected to find abundant documentation. After all, in the LoRaWAN world, the open nature of the technology has been emphasized since its inception. However, after quite a bit of research, I still remain somewhat uncertain about the basic workings of LoRa, which at the very least calls for a blog post to compile the information I have found.

I invite those with a solid understanding of the subject to enrich this post with comments, and I will incorporate the key elements accordingly.

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Take aways from 2024 LPWAN days at Pau

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LPWAN Day is an annual conference for university research in the field of LPWAN. This year’s edition was held in Pau. The event provides an opportunity to review the state of research on technologies such as LoRaWAN, Mioty, Wirepas, and satellite experiments, fostering technical, detailed, and inspiring exchanges.

This year, about sixty participants attended, mainly from academia but also from industries like Semtech, Wirepas, Schneider, and Kineis. As in every edition, we had many very in-depth and passionate discussions. The organization was flawless, and the hospitality in Pau was exceptional. However, I must admit that our visits to Glacier Giorgios may have skewed our perceptions.

In summary, it was two wonderful days, with beautiful weather and exceptional people. Here are my key takeaways.

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Proxmox cluster setup

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I recently created a Proxmox cluster for some physical machine … for making it short, it sometime more efficient to run its own machine that going to cloud, in particular when you can manage a lower service level. So I use a mix of solutions, some on VM running on cloud provider solution like for critical production (Helium services as an example) and I have some bare-metal machine for high computation service (like Helium ETL) where cloud provider would invoice $3000 a month and for the rest I decided to run a Proxmox cluster to have an intermediate low cost infra with a minimum of redundancy I can master.

I started with 2 nodes with the ability to move workload from one to the other and as recently i got a corruption on one of my ZFS storage loosing one of the NVME, I’ve been happy of this setup. Unfortunately, when restarting the damaged node after being repaired, the second one restarted all the VMs causing an unexpected service failure. Let’s see how to setup a Proxmox cluster for not getting into this.

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News from LoRaWAN Live Munich

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This week saw the Munich edition of LoRaWAN Live, the event for the LoRaWAN community organized by the LoRa Alliance. This event rotates locations with each iteration, and this edition marked the return of the event to Europe.

As usual, the event was a professional gathering for alliance members who use these events to advance the evolution of the LoRaWAN standard. Participants included gateway manufacturers, device makers, and electronic component producers. Unfortunately, this focus, often comes at the expense, of non-member users and smaller players, who are less present compared to events like The Things Conference or larger, more general conferences, like IoT Solutions.

The main downside of this conference, in my opinion, was the low attendance of end users and newcomers. This is likely due to the high cost of attending the conference, not to mention the hotel prices during the Euro 2024 period.

Despite this, the conference featured a series of high-quality presentations on the development of use cases, market growth, and opportunities for in-depth discussions with technology experts. As always, it was a chance to meet new people and have engaging conversations.

So, what’s the state of the LoRaWAN ecosystem in 2024?

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