IoT – exploration of LoRaWAN – part 4

My experiments with LoRaWAN were cut short by the announcement that The Things Network (TTN) was to discontinue its V2 network in favour of a new V3. This coincided with Laird’s decision to manufacture region specific versions of its gateway, and all existing equipment was designated US region and would not directly support frequency plans used here in Australia.

After some years there is a solution. Newer firmware for the RG191 supports the more generic Semtech basic forwarder and protocols for TTN to configure the RG191 frequency plan… so it is possible to connect the RG191 to the North American server (instead of the AU server), and configure the gateway in TTN for Australian frequency plans, and it all comes together.

An existing Arduino application was tried but needed modification for changed network protocols, and it was ported to PlatformIO. So, the end result is that it is working again in TTN Community V3, and log records verify that it is indeed using the AU915 frequency plan.

The trial end ‘device’ is a Wemos M0 board with BME280 sensor, and Dragino Lora shield for the radio.

Above is a flow chart of the data path.

The plots for 10 hours working in the garage.