LoRa looks like a really cool technology, but I'm always a little bit hesitant about advocating adopting a proprietary protocol, and LoRaWAN is very much proprietary.
I tried to make an open source radio system like LoRa before LoRa existed, but I mostly failed to deliver on my kickstarter. :-/
I did make a 915/868 MHz frequency hopping radio protocol that is open source, as well as ARM powered hardware to drive it, but it turns out everything I wanted to do was way more work than I realized.
Bummer that LoRa hardware is proprietary, but I suppose so was the cpu and radio chip I used. Would be nice to get some open source digital radio chips!
I have lots of hardware I could share if anyone would pick it up in the Bay Area, and I can make all the IP CC0 or MIT licensed instead of copyleft it desired.
These base stations (we call them gateways) are owned and operated by individuals, communities or companies. The gateways demodulate transmissions and forward them to The Things Network's public community network.
Lack of public (official) specifications is much less of a problem than patents. Closed specifications can be reverse-engineered, but patents impede even independent clean-room implementations.
That's far enough to send email[1]. It's incredible the kind of distances that they've been able to demonstrate with LoRa, even with the low data rates it means that wireless sensors it monitoring can be done with small batteries and solar charging almost indefinitely. Weather stations and farms are perfect for this kind of thing.
As far as I can tell the only reason such an insane result was possible is because the transmission was in clear air. Using LoRa in a city you'd be happy to get 10 km.
Yes, transmissions that have line of sight can go extremely far, mostly limited by the curvature of the Earth, which is why these records are typically broken using helium balloons. There have also been several interesting ground-to-ground records [1] [2]
The distances are of course much lower if there are obstacles (like concrete buildings) between the transmitter and receiver.
You can use other gateways in the same network to communicate in both directions with your device. There are also proposals to allow roaming for devices to communicate over multiple networks.
Oh yes they can connect p2p. The ESP32/ESP8266 modules you see at 6$ don't have a lora module though, that's extra (but still a good combo) more like ~15$.
I bought two with old screens and don't have any base stations. I beleive they can be connected in mesh with more too (not sure how many channels are needed)!
When you say they "don't have a lora module" but they still work in p2p, what does that mean? Parts are done in software that normally would be in a hardware module?
My bad, I mean the ESP32/ESP8266 modules on their own don't have any LORA capabilities (The ESP32 has both Bluetooth BLE and Wifi, ESP8266 has just wifi).
However LORA itself does work over P2P, and a common module is the ESP32 + LORA + OLED screen, which I have used and tested without any gateways.
Also I think separate from LORA altogether - There's something called ESPNOW which lets the ESP's mesh network, but that's not related to LORA and I haven't ever played with it.
Wow! Way faster than I remembered! It was a while back. I spent some time trying to design a payload for a slow application with connectivity challenges once upon a time.
The technology is designed to scale to tens of thousands of active end devices per gateway (base station), but for that it does assume that most traffic is from end devices to the network. Larger scale can be achieved by adding more gateways.
End devices hop over multiple channels. Most gateways can receive simultaneously on 8, 16 or up to 64 channels (using 1, 2 or up to 8 antennas). The network can dynamically adapt the channels used by each end device to distribute traffic over the available channels.
End devices will use different data rates (spreading factors) for their transmissions (depending on required range). The LoRa modulation allows gateways to receive multiple transmissions on the same channel simultaneously if those transmissions use different spreading factors (most of the time, the spreading factors are "almost orthogonal").
You can deploy more gateways to create smaller cells. The network can then tell end devices to lower their transmit power.
It doesn't/didn't, unless they have relaxed some rules or opened more frequencies for experimentation. Last time I checked LoRa guidelines required each node to stay quiet most of the time for very good reasons, that is, one could transmit only for a short time (iirc just a few minutes per day). More than enough for remote sensors/alerts etc but hardly usable for any other purpose beyond research. Still impressive results though!
Let's hope its success will push for opening of more bands so that traffic rules can be relaxed a bit, but I'm not expecting free (as in unregulated) public availability anytime soon: that would be a mess.
The Things Network's public community network indeed has guidelines to ensure fair access for the entire community.
If you deploy a private LoRaWAN network with your own gateways and your own servers, you only need to comply with the limits imposed by local regulators for the (unlicensed) spectrum you're using. In Europe's 868MHz ISM band, transmitters are limited by a 1% duty cycle. In the US's 915MHz band, transmissions are limited to a 400ms dwell time. Other regions have similar limits.
Ti's long range 15.4 implementation is not open but is much cheaper than LoRa, you just need two $20 Launchpad boards, one as a basestation and one as your client.
You could also just use the LaunchPad's packet radio api to implement your own simple protocol, you just need to remember to keep to the limitations imposed by the authorities (duty cycle, wait time).
Sorry about that, I had to shorten the title to comply with HN's title length limit, and when I saw my mistake I couldn't edit it anymore. It would be nice if a moderator could fix that.
Can the mods fix? They won't fix several other submissions which I've pointed out were misleading, so...
Easy proof the mods aren't neutral by any means. Recorded and added to the 3.2GB file of shame they've got on them (and that's the smallest one. I've got stuff from MicroSoft, RedHat, and Debian groups that would make the mods puke trying to figure out how to word the headline without causing a civil war. Too bad they'll never get it with their current behavior.)
The word you're looking for is "subjectively". There are lots of aesthetic reasons to like the metric system but realistically the best one is the one you have internalized.
You can only clearly judge two things if you have them both internalized.
I for example speak German and English and I can assure you that both these languages have their merits. German is a more precise language with more nuance and a bigger vocabulary, chaining of nouns allows for ad-hoc invention of new words which other people will quickly understand etc. English is much easier to learn, is less clunky to express everyday stuff and it lends itself to certain ways of thinking that I wouldn’t want to miss.
While these are based on subjective observations there is plenty of research that shows how language affects thinking and one could argue there are objective differences.
Are the benifits of metric prefixes, a decimal base, better interfacing with Si units etc really just subjective?
If you live in an imperial world, these benifits might diminish, but using this as an argument would be similar to saying “German is not a good language because where I live it is not spoken”
Please explain how you think Celcius is objectively better than Fahrenheit. For the layperson the only difference is that Celcius requires decimal points to distinguish between temperatures you can feel and has a simple water boiling and freezing poin
Back to the larger point: if your argument is that it's similar to comparing German and English, you've lost. Bringing it down to effectively a language barrier means it's obviously not worth any switching cost for a few minor conveniences.
