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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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.
For the second year I had the chance to introduce the IoT and LPWAN networks to a group of 150 students in computer engineering school. This year we add a longer time to detail a bit the Sigfox and LoRaWan solution and I’ve added a part on the IoT security.
I’ve tried to propose a different point of view on security aspect, not based on fear but practical things to do and a larger contextual aspect. I’ll try to make video on this specific topic on my Youtube (where you can find in french most of the content of these slides).
So … here are the slides, for my students who joined or not the conferences, and for those who would like to join this course.
This was the more expected announcement for Sigfox Connect event: the availability of the micro-gateway: a Sigfox gateway you can buy, own and deploy on your own location.
This was expected to be introduce has it has already been disclosed once FCC certification made it public as it has been noticed by Nestor Ayuso on twitter some days ago.
This model is standard for LoRaWan ecosystem running on private network as on public network. For Sigfox it has always been possible to expend the network but it was a little bit complex because you had to rent the basestation from Sigfox and the basestation itself was an operator equipment: something made for being installed on a roof, not in your office.
Sigfox is now proposing the micro-gateway !
TTN Gateway
I’ve waited a long time to get it since I pledge on the kickstarter campaign but it’s now here and as all what TTN have done until now this it a really nice object.
The design itself is really good. You can easily fix it on a window or a wall.
You can hack this gateway a lot … by the way it is not yet my purpose.
And the installation process it so good.. You may understand I really liked it.
Sigfox phase decoding
Sigfox is a LPWAn communication technology and network dedicated to IoT. The specificity of this solution is related to the LPWAn caracteristics : communicating Low Power (25mW) and Wide Area (60km).
This is possible thanks to particular radio characteristics and modulation. This post will describes how it works at radio level and protocol level.
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.
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