Issue: Connecting clients to the gateway?
Setup:
Server:
Details:
What do I have to do to set up a second 7246 as a client to connect to another 7246 configured as a concentrator?
Hei @drewlentz,
This is not really a viable option.
RAK7247 is a gateway, in LoRaWAN these are similar to a traditional Wi-Fi router. They gather data from end devices (LoRa Nodes) and forward it to a LoRa Server where it is processed, loosely speaking.
They are not designed to talk to each other via LoRa. So if you want to have an end device to connect to your RAK7246 perhaps you should look at one of the nodes we offer:
Or develop your own using our development solution called WisBlock:
Regards
Vladislav
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Do you perhaps mean “configured as a network server”? In that case, about the same things you’d do to connect to a cloud instance of a network server - though in reality that would be a good time to relocate the network server to the cloud, as most Internet solutions commonly used for a gateway won’t allow inbound connections.
If you literally mean “concentrator” then you’ll need to define what you mean by that word. In the realm of LoRa a “concentrator” is the mutli-channel DSP receiver card incorporating a chip from the SX130x series used at the heart of a gateway - eg, the RAK2247, RAK833, RAK2287, etc. Typically the “concentrator” hangs off the gateway embedded computer’s SPI (or with translation, USB) bus and is managed by local software, which then takes the results and pushes them over a network socket to a cloud or local LoRaWAN network server.
In terms of one gateway using LoRa itself to forward packets to another, this is theoretically contemplated by Semtech who makes the silicon, but largely only exists in the form of whitepapers, not deployed implementations. Related is the idea of “repeaters” - again, at the stage of whitepapers and cutting edge experiments, but not really deployed. Also all of the nodes using such a capability would require timing adjustments which are typically not supported by current nodes, either.
If you want to use a gateway as a LoRaWAN node that’s typically not economically advisable, and at least in bandplans which use 500 KHz downlink bandwidth going to be quite tricky to implement, as a concentrator only has one 500 KHz IF, meaning that you’d have to be reconfiguring the concentrator for each downlink.
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Thanks for the response. I figured that out after I posted But figured I would wait for the response just in case there was something that was missing.
I’ve ordered the Track D and the Track Lite.
I’m still looking for a solution using raspi zero w though.
It’s generally best to run the LoRaWAN stack on a dedicated processor rather than on the pi itself - so you might want to look at something like the 3rd party offering of a RAK811 module on a pi hat.
Keep in mind though that the data flow which LoRaWAN can sustain is quite limited - software running on a pi may expect something more in keeping with a traditional network interface, with many orders of magnitude more bandwidth than LoRaWAN can support?
What’s your actual application need?
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