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  • Author Author: ntewinkel
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Honey Bee Safe: LoraWan Outdoor Attempt

ntewinkel
Honey Bee Safe: LoraWan Outdoor Attempt

After getting all of the initial bits set up while at my desk, I was unfortunately unable to reach any LoraWan gateway on The Things Network.

Given that I was testing it at my desk indoors, I knew that this wasn’t the optimal situation. So I decided to try it from the back deck of our carriage house, which is about 15 feet (5 meters) up from the ground and faces the gateway in Comox that is nearest to me, about 2.5kms away.

The trick is, I don’t have a laptop to try it with! I had considered maybe setting up a Raspberry Pi up in the suite, but luckily I was able to save myself that effort and just use my old android phone with a serial monitor and a little USB-OTG cable that I already had. This is more portable, especially if I want to try connecting from a different location later on.

image

A few things are not optimal: firstly, the antennas I have are not tuned to be used as Lora antennas; secondly, there’s a forest between me and the gateway, and probably some houses on the other side of the forest; and thirdly, I really don’t know what I’m doing Laughing, so there’s a chance I’m missing some other critical step Thinking 

image

Unfortunately, it still didn’t connect. I might try driving closer to the gateway at some point, but for now I think I’ll just continue on with the image detection part of the challenge using the Nicla Vision.

Ps, does anyone know if I have to specify which gateway I intend to connect to? I’m wondering if that’s part of the problem Thinking 

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    Nothing wrong with that pi3 gateway. It depends on whether it is a multi channel gateway though. It does say tts v3 which is good. The old gateways were ttn v2 and those are no longer working. The pi3 may has a good HAT on it that makes it a good gateway 

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    also fun - the name seems to indicate it's a Raspberry Pi3 Smiley

  • in reply to ralphjy

      wrote:
    > This may not help, but you could try going to this site: https://ttnmapper.org/heatmap/

    That totally helps! thank you.

    It looks like the two in my area are similarly very weak gateways. Plus that "comox-beeheaven" one I was aiming for appears to be "The Things Stack CE"... not sure if that's a whole different thing.

    image

    So, judging by that map, it would be unlikely that I could ever connect to it from here. I'm left of the "Altitude" line - the grey shaded area is the forest park behind us.

    Bummer. But thank you for showing me that website, because it saves me from wasting more time attempting to connect to either of them.

    So... I think the only LoraWan option for me would be to set up my own, equally weak, gateway Smiley

  • in reply to ntewinkel

    This may not help, but you could try going to this site: https://ttnmapper.org/heatmap/

    Here are the 5 gateways that show in my area:

    image

    I am in the lower left.  All of the gateways are indicated as "weak".  Not sure how these values are derived.

    image

    This is the detail for my gateway (location is manually entered, altitude is probably closer to 100 m).

    image

    Not sure why "beams" isn't working and the CSV connection data appears to be blank?

    But I did look on my dashboard and I have a couple of devices connecting that are not mine. and at reasonable RSSI.

    imageimage

    Not sure where these devices are located.  I think the mapping CSV data would tell me if it were working.

    I am away from home, so my devices are turned off, but I get pretty decent RSSI in the -45 to -80 dBm range -> so that one device at -81dBm can't be too far from me.

  • in reply to ralphjy

    @ralphjy wrote
    >I haven't had much luck connecting to other gateways in my area (I've always used my gateway) .

    Oh that's a good point. I wonder if the gateways in my area are similarly low-power and set up for their own personal use too.

    Is there a way to get details on gateways on The Things Network? 

    >...antennas oriented in a vertical vs horizontal plane and try rotating it...

    I tried that to some extent, and thank you for answering that question too! (which I had but didn't ask) Slight smile  last night when I looked at the map again I realized I wasn't pointing it completely in the correct direction, which is more South-East instead of straight East. I'm guessing that pointing the top green side of the flat antenna towards the gateway would give me the best chance?

    I suspect that the 2 local gateways are low-power personal use ones though Disappointed

    The Nicla Vision board includes WiFi, and has Python examples for things like MQTT, so it might be easiest to just bypass the need for Lora (and the MKR WAN 1310 board), at least for now.