I have some Lora enabled ESP32 modules and I am working on an application that requires a private network with following features:
no LORAWAN at all, I need only the LORA physical layer
my battery-operated nodes are normally deep-sleeping, except for Lora receiver, and all are awakened by the reception of a Lora message, carrying the address of the node addressed (each node is configured in advance with a non-volatile address)
the non-addressed nodes returns immediately to sleep, the addressed one makes its work (send some data to the application) and then returns to sleep
My application is a Windows application and I chose the RAK7268v2 gateway in order to communicate with my nodes.
I set up the gateway in my LAN and tried to configure it, using the Built-in Network Server and Generic MQTT, without success. I read a lot of documentation and forum topics and I got two questions
(for now !):
First: is it correct to use the RAK7268 gateway to communicate with my custom no-Lorawan network ?
I saw in the documentation many references to Lora standard nodes, beacons, Device EUI, etc.
Are my Lora enabled ESP32 modules (no LoraWAN) handled by the gateway ?
Second: if the answer to the first question is yes, is it correct for me to choose the the Built-in Network
Server and Generic MQTT configuration ?
An update to my own post, hoping this could be useful to someone: I chose for my custom network the Packet Forwarder mode, with the Semtech UDP GWMP Protocol.
I don’t know if this is the best choice, but I had success, after some difficulties, in reading the first “hello” packet sent by a node !
Thank you for your reply, Nikola.
What you say is not what I have ascertained: I happily succeeded in using RAK7268v2 in my network.
I chose the gateway Packet Forwarder mode and I currently successfully receive and send LoRa messages in my non-Lorawan, only physical layer network. Bye,
Aldo De Santis
Hello @aldesa ,
So you just use the Packet Forwarder for the LoRa messages? Interestingly as these messages won’t have the LoRaWAN Stack encapsulation but the Packet Forwarder recognize and forward them.
I never tried that so thank you for the information @aldesa .