RAK7268V2 MQTT is disfunctional

LPWAN Developer Gateways / Concentrators
1

I am trying to connect the Edge Lite 2 to my Home Assistant MQTT broker. I am using the “Integration Interface Parameters” pull down. I have 10 other devices NOT related to this device that work without issue but no matter wat I try, I cannot get it to cummunicate. When I search the system logs for MQTT I see that the device is sending data to

{“RAK_TRACKER”:{“mqtt”:{“keepalive”:10,“clean_session”:true,“tls_version”:“tlsv1.2”,“password”:“6wEDefEzndcJ”,“broker_port”:8883,“broker_ip”:“mq.kritto.net”,“username”:“gateway-pub”,“tls_mode”:“ca_signed”,“qos”:1,“auth_enable”:true,“retain”:false,“app_id”:60000,“client_id”:""}}}

I would really like to know WHY?

Why do I not find ANY reference to my MQTT broker?

Why is there so little documentation?

As you can tell I am a little annoyed. if I if I had it to do all over again I would not have purchased this gateway.

Can I please be directed to where I can find some clear and consise documentation and receive and explanation as to why data is being published to an outside source?

If I can make this work I will gladly post a tutorial for others in my position.

Thank you,
MRT_MT

1 Like
2

Not exactly a good approach/tone if you are trying to get someone to help you…

The way I do it is:

  • I have my Edge Lite 2 push the MQTT messages to an external MQTT broker outside of the RAK device. I have mosquitto running in a docker container on my local network.
  • Use Node-RED (also running in a docker container on my local network) to monitor the MQTT topics and push the values to Home Assistant Devices created in node-red

There may be other, maybe even easier, ways to do it. But I do all of my home automation logic in node-red, so tend to use it as the common area I integrate systems. The only reason I push the data to HA at all is to stick it on a dashboard.

If you are looking for a way to directly get the MQTT data into HA from the router itself, I can’t help you, as I have never tried doing it that way.

3

You are correct about the tone. My appologies, very frustrating moment. However the documentation is severly lacking making it very difficult for a first time LoraWan user. Regardless of tone the Rak Staff should have jumped in to provide assistance. They do not appear to answer many support requests.

For someone else going down this road I determined that the no MQTT messages flow until you successfully join a sensor and secondly I determined that I could only get it to work with unique application ids using the application id from the sensor itself. Once this occured I was able to veryfy the MQTT data connection and then inject data into Node-Red then into HA via a sensor node once the data was successfully decoded.

  1. Use Built-in network server in the RAK7268
  2. Use “Integration Interface Parameters” to configure MQTT data to inject into your external MQTT broker.
  3. Use the unique “Application Key” that you find on your Lora device to configure each Lora sensor seperately.
  4. Extract and decode the hex data for each sensor and use the HA sensor node to add to HA.

Once you get one working you then you can really enjoy LoraWan.

Thank you Jason for jumping in.

Good luck to everyone else trying to use Lora sesors locally without the cloud.
-Dave