Category Archives: Technology

Tips and test on technological product and components. Operating system, networks, hardware, security…
Astuces et tests autour de produits et composants technologiques, systèmes, réseaux, hardware, sécurité …

Make a Laird Sentrius an outdoor gateway

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The Laird Sentrius LoRaWan gateway is a low cost, stable and easy to configure on The Things Network gateway. They are indoor gateway. I want to install it outdoor to offer a better coverage.

In certain situation the easiest way to install it outdoor is to use an external antenna and a long antenna cable. In some other situation this approach is complex to implement and the easiest way is to install the gateway outdoor with its antenna and network connection.

The best is to use an outdoor LoRaWan gateway. The price is usually > 600€. Even if in general the outdoor gateways includes GPS and Cellphone connectivity. In this post I’ll explain how I make one of Laird Sentrius outdoor because it costs less than 250€ for the gateway itself.

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HopeRF RFM95 and arduino a low cost LoRaWan solution

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The HopeRF RFM95w module proposes to access LoRa at low cost. Its unitary price is around 4€ on shop like aliexpress. A version with a shield is also existing. Its name is Lora1276-C1 from niceRF. These different transceivers are using Semtech SX1276 chip. It makes this kind of chip interesting for regional low cost LoRaWAN design in association with a MCU. Here we are going to use it with an Arduino platform.

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The Sigfox Micro Base Station test

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The Sigfox Micro basestation has been announced during the last Sigfox Connect event in Berlin. The base-station allow to extend the Sigfox public network, at low price, for your private location.

This post is detailing my experience with the micro base-station and the field test I’ve made on an industrial site.

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Stop telling me Sigfox is clear payload, for real you’re just lazy ;)

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The usual attack on Sigfox network is related to the “security”. Behind this large concept, for real, the only point is related to the use of clear payload over the air. As a consequence some are extending this to the possible replay after 2048 frames so regarding a standard use of Sigfox is will be about 6 month later…

That said, for real, all of this is just ignorance from these pseudo “security” experts and developer laziness. Don’t beat me for saying that, I’m part of the lazy developer, the only difference is I’m not complaining and I’m aware the solution is in my own hands.

Because, for real, the payload encryption exists as documented in the post I’ve published on May 2017 and detailed on the Feb 2017 technical security paper published by Sigfox or like in this document.

So saying the Sigfox is not proposing payload encryption is wrong and this option is also fixing any 6 months later message replay. It’s like saying WiFi is  not secured because you can create an open-network.

So now, let’s see why encryption is not the default option, why a network encryption standard is not the best option and then see how to stop to be a lazy developer and make encryption working.

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10 things you can’t ignore when writing a Firmware

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When you write an IoT firmware, there are different things you may never forget to think about… The coming 10 things you can’t ignore are coming from my experience of smart object creation and the associated field experience.

The field experience is unfortunately the real step where you will improve your firmware and discover all you have forgotten when you have written the firmware and tested it in your laboratory. In laboratory everything is perfect.

The following 10 things you can’t ignore when writing a Firmware is a non exhaustive checklist of points to verify before pushing your code to the field. It is also a list of  test conditions you can execute to validate a Firmware / device made by a third party.

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Send Sigfox messages with STM32 + S2LP

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STM32 solution for using Sigfox is actually one of the best offer on the market has the solution is powerful, low consumption and allows global coverage with the use of the last Sigfox library versions including Monarq, Bubble… Different module providers are actually designing solutions based on this platform.

In this post we are going to see how to configure the STM32 platform, starting from a STM32L053 devkit plus a S2LP extension. Using a eclipse/gcc environment. The environment installation is described in this post about installing Eclipse for STM32.

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Getting started with GNURadio & scapy

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GNURadio is an open-source software for making Software Defined Radio. It can be used to model a radio transmission or the process a real radio communication.

Scapy is a python tool set able to interact with GNURadio. Basically GNURadio will receive an signal from a SDR key and process it to get a digital sequence. Scapy will process this sequence and potentially generate a new sequence to be process by GNURadio to be transmitted.

There are plenty of example of GNURadio/Scappy usage to hack, simulate, learn many radio protocols like WiFi, GSM, Bluetooth… I want to play a little with Sigfox also so that’s why I started to investigate on this tool.

As this tool is a bit complicated, this post details the key element having helped me to getting started with this tool.

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Review Laird Sentrius LoRaWan Gateway

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After having tested different LoRaWan gateway like Kerlink iFemToCell, TheThingsGateway and Kerlink Wirnet, in the past two years, I was looking for a new low cost indoor gateway for deploying TheThingsNetwork (the global crowd-sourced LoRaWan network) in my city.

Gateway are not all easy to shop, Kerlink at first. As one of my iFemToCell has burned into the hell this summer with no reason after only 3 months powered-on I was not looking for the same. TheThingsGateway has different semiconductor provider reseller but myne suffer of certain instabilities actually and I need to reboot on regular basis. So that’s the reason of this new try.

Let’s see how to setup on TTN.

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