RAK3172 Lora P2P feature request ( CRC, implicit header )

Hello,

I have been reading the P2P instructions ( LoRaWAN | RAKwireless Documentation Center ) and as far as I can see there is no option to turn CRC off.
Also I don’t see a command to select implicit header instead of explicit header.

So my feature request, or wishlish items for RUI3 (and arduino api) would be:

  • Support for turning CRC on and off
  • Support for changing between implicit and explicit header mode.

We have a use case where we use very low data rates to archive good range in a challenging environment (temporary use in forest). The number of messages / intervals differs and is not fixed. This makes it important for us to reduce the size of messages. Compared to current modules we use I can see there are advantages to RAK3172 since we can adjust the preamble length.

If we could disable CRC we can reduce the message size by 2 bytes which would be significant. We have no use of the CRC since we use aggressive error correction with Reed-Solomon error codes together with the RedCos ( Energy Efficient Data Recovery from Corrupted LoRa Frames | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore ) and that requires CRC to be included in payload ( so receiver can see the actual CRC bytes, not just whether message failed CRC check or not )

I was also hoping to be able to experiment using implicit mode. Don’t know if it will make sense given it will restrict us to a single message length*. But apart from reducing the size of the message it may have another advantage. If there is a bit error in the header I assume the Lora chip will discard the message directly (since it cannot determine its length and Code rate). If it is not present then a higher percentage of message can be received and hopefully be error corrected with Reed-Solomon / RedCos.

(* It would be useful to have different message length for receive and send mode)

/Henrik Larsson

Welcome to the forum @henla464 .

I will forward your wishes to our R&D team, but I cannot promise if it will be implement or when.

RUI3 is now open source, so you can dig into the sources and implement these features. We are open to merge requests into the BSPs.

Thank you!

Where can I find the sources?

RAK-STM32-RUI