Tag Archives: IoT

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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IoT slide deck 2023-07 update

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Two years since I did not published my IoT slide deck. Here is the new version, now about 345 slides about IoT topics including Sigfox, LoRaWan, Helium and much more. In this edition, you will also find some slide about the digital transformation impact on the society and the environmental impact.

All the slides on this deck can be freely reused for any educational content; Most of them are also used in my different MooC you can fin on my Youtube IoT Channel

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Deploy Dragino LPS8 (DATAONLY) on Helium

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LPS8

The Dragino LPS8, LoRaWAN gateway is a helium ready device you can add to Helium as a Data-Only. It means it does not participate to PoC but earn HNT for transferring traffic.

It’s not a ready-to-go data-only, so you need to register the hotspot in the helium block-chain on your own but it run the gateway-rs software internally.

This device as been designed for Helium, but not only, it can be connected to TTN or another different network, like a private network. The installation with Helium network is not really complicated but you will need to process some command on a terminal and manipulate wallet-cli.

To save you some time, I do not recommend this hardware, as it suffers from two main issues: poor noise isolation leading to low reception quality, and overheating problems that cause frequent unexpected reboots.

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Installing ChirpStack LoRaWan network server for Helium

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ChirpStack is an open-source LoRaWAN network server that is being use in a coming future with Helium as a replacement of the console. This blog post explains how to install it with the companion solution I’ve built to interact with Helium router.

This blog post requires you to own an OUI.

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Industrial IoT (IIoT) vs IoT for industry (IoT4i)

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You heard these terms, increasingly used, that are IoT (Internet of Things) and IIoT (Industrial IoT). Terms that seem so close that we tend to think that they are intimately linked, or even that they address the same thing but in a different context, which for the second would be that of industry. But the technicians, or marketers, are teasing or, because they surf the trends, it tends to generate misleading shortcuts.

You understand, behind my words, that there is no more than a fairly distant cousinship between IoT and IIoT. I will try to explain why and what are the consequences of these differences on the technologies used in each of these areas.

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Repair broken Nebra indoor with eMMC failure

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The first versions of Nebra indoor miner came with CM3 (Raspberry Pi Compute Module) embedding eMMC memory. As you may know, Helium has been really I/O intensive, particularly this summer when the blockchain was filling really fast the small amount of storage the CM3 has. As a consequence, all my Nebra indoor miner dead around the same week. Diagnostic seemed to be a storage failure.

Here is the story about making them live again

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