Category Archives: IoT

all about Internet of things

Sigfox & LoRaWan network architecture and network kernels

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New episode of my LPWAn post series, this time, about the network architecture and the role of the network kernel.

The network architecture is different than a classical IP communication from client to server: the LPWAn architecture is based on a kernel network allowing the protocol transformation from the Sigfox / LoRaWan world to the IP-Internet world.

In the LPWAn protocol the addressing is limited to one device address only to reduce the frame size and as a consequence all the frame have to be captured by a central system: the network kernel. It will route the message correctly to the end user application based on device association made on registration.

This post is related to a french video (as usual) and detailed in the following part of this post.

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Let’s be part of The Things Network with a Kerlink LoRa IoT station

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The Things Network (TTN) is a global LoRaWan public network kernel based on crowd-source infrastructure. This initiative sounds really interesting in my point of view because it breaks one of the main LoRaWan issues : the country based operators organization.

Related to this good point, the negative point is the current area covered by a such network limited to the contributor localization, generally in the main cities.

That said, I’m convinced : when you want to create a private LoRaWan network you have to manage a network kernel managing gateways, device authorizations… You can do it yourself, you can pay someone to do it for you or, eventually, you can lever TTN for this use. As a counterpart you will extend the network and offer this benefit to any around. That way it makes sense and gives large opportunities to the networks and it’s private users.

Long introduction for a technical topic … How to join this network once you have a Kerlink LoRa Iot station available ? Continue reading →

Why Antennas mater in IoT & LPWAN ?

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Episode 3 & 4 of my Youtube series about LPWAN is about antennas for LPWAN and impact on object design. The episode 4 go deeper on the way to improve radio performance by tuning and adapting antennas with matching circuit.

As usual, this series of post are summarizing in English the content of my French video on youtube.

 

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All what you need to know about regulation on RF 868MHz for LPWan

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The RF 868MHz is a public bandwidth European Low Power Networks (LPWAN) as Sigfox and LoRaWan are using for communicating.

This bandwidth is regulated by different norms like ERC-REC-70-3E in Europe and have national norms in relation. In France ARCEP 2014-1263 seems to be the last one validated in the JO on the 30th of January 2015. The following video is a second episode of my VLOG on LPWan technologies. As usual, the video is in French but this post will give you a overview in english.

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Learn about Sigfox and LoRa radio technologies

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This post is a VLOG entry, as usual in French, you will find the english text version in the next part of the post.

Basically, I’m explaining how the two LPWAN technologies : Sigfox and LoRa use the radio frequency to communicate with a low power consumption in a wide area environment.

In this video you will find a mix of demonstration with voice to highlight how it works with day-to-day life example and spectrum capture of both technology to visualize how it looks like.

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Install mosquitto (mqtt) server on CentOS to publish IoT data

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Since a long to time I did not post about MQTT … The main reason was I uses MQTT as a protocol to publish data directly from a device but in a centralized environment like SigFox / LoraWan you can’t use it directly on the device. Actually I have some devices communicating with a backend and the question about how to provide these information to the customers of my service are raising. To match this pattern I have to ways : providing and API where the information are pulled by the customer and MQTT where the information are pushed to the customer.

One choice is not against the other one, I had the two kind of customers. For this reason I will describe how we can implement a MQTT server (mosquitto) to push Sigfox data device as json content.

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How it burns in my car

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Arduino Temperature SensorI make a post on measuring temperature with different sensors and an objective : watch the impact of designing a correct box for you IoT you want to put in a Car.

When sun is lighting your windshield it is not a surprise to get high temperature, but did you expect to get up to 90°C when the outside temperature is about 35°C ?

The packaging have a big impact on temperature as this post will detail it.

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LoRa Wan in a rural environment

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Lora-300x171After making LoRaWan test in a city environment, I make some test in a rural environment with the objective of evaluating the capability for being used in connected farming environment.

The result is really like what we have got in a city, eventually better in a way as the antenna position was on altitude. The following map makes with 6kbps communication shows the coverage. You can see that the coverage is really limited on the Eastern direction. This is due to higher mountains this way. Mountain are the main limiting elements and as you can see, even on short distance communication they are blocking any signal.

Read more to access the map.

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