LoRa Station 📡

  • LoRadio: Radio Mapping with LoRaWAN

    I am working on a community project based in Australia that has been so far a blast. So I thought I’d share the basics of the project. The main idea is that there’s a community radio station somewhere in the boondocks, and the locals don’t always get good reception. So some of the guys thought…

  • LoRa 101

    This post was born in a Discord chat room, in French, so I have reformatted this in a blog post. I’ll translate it at some point… D’abord, un cocorico. LoRa est une technologie inventée en France, par Cycleo à Grenoble, puis of course les inventeurs ont vendu aux Ricains. Comme d’hab. LoRa est la couche…

  • Setting up a LoRaWAN Distance Test

    One question we get a lot at RAK (and, I suppose, at other companies making LoRa equipment) is “How far does it go?” We can also give figures – and often do – but it’s nice to be able to back it up with actual numbers, gathered in real-life situations. My first real-life LoRa distance…

  • How to Code for the RAK811 and Lora P2P in Arduino IDE

    The RAK811 is an old friend of mine, released a little before I joined RAKwireless. I came in three versions: the stamp module, the Arduino Shield, and the XBee-style breakout. The first iterations of the Arduino shield had issues, which were corrected after I was given a couple of them, and pointed out the flaws.…

  • LoRa Companion: How to make a LoRa Dongle for your computer with RUI3

    While LoRa and LoRaWAN have penetrated the IoT world, providing an easy-to-use long-range communication solution, computers are by and large ignored. Rare is the laptop with a LoRa module included. But some solutions have started to pop up, at various price points. I have been making custom LoRa USB dongles for a while now, connected…

  • Random Numbers and LoRa

    LoRa chips bring an unexpected bonus, related to radio frequencies: random numbers generation. Both the SX127x and the SX126x series provide this service, through one or more registers. In the SX127x series, the process is a little more involved (and some LoRa libraries for this chip get it wrong), but offers more control on the…

  • Channel Activity Detection: How to ensure your LoRa packets are sent properly

    Background Currently, most of the LoRa® networks, either ad-hoc peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, or under the LoRaWAN® specification, use an ALOHAmedia access control mechanism, on a set of parameters (radio frequency (Freq), bandwidth (BW) and spreading factor (SF)), regardless of whether another device is already transmitting, which could result in a collision. While ALOHA allows for a…