DIY LoRaWAN gateway with support The Thing Networks and Helium.
I was always interested in LoRa, LoRaWAN, SigFox and other low-power and long range wireless technologies.
A couple of years ago, I build a single channel LoRaWAN Gateway. Although this was usable for custom projects, it is not a fully compliant LoRaWAN gateway. A fully compliant gateway requires a LoRa concentrator with 8 simultaneously working channels, mine has one channel.
At some point, I started looking fully compliant LoRaWAN gateways. As the off-the-shelf LoRaWAN gateways were a little bit expensive, I searched for DIY solutions.
One of the options was to use Raspberry Pi with a RAK2245 Pi Hat Edition. About two mounts ago I contacted RAK Wireless, and they were kind enough to send me over a RAK2245 Pi Hat Edition for free to build a gateway 🙂
RAK2245 Pi Hat Edition
So, here it is the RAK Wireless RAK2245 Pi Hat Edition:
The RAK2245 is a Raspberry Pi HAT featuring a LoRaWAN multichannel concentrator module (SX1301) and a GPS module (Ublox MAX-7Q).
There multiple version with support for all the major frequency regions (EU433, CN470, IN865, EU868, AU915, US915, KR920, AS920 and AS923).
The RAK2245 cones with the following accessories:
- LoRA antenna
- GPS antenna
- mounting screws
The RAK2245 can be used with Raspberry Pi 3, 3+ and Raspberry Pi 4. I'm using it with a Raspberry Pi 4:
The assembled gateway looks like this:
The are multiple LoRaWAN compatible networks available. The Things Network (TTN) is the biggest and most popular of these. First, we will connect to the TTN.
To be able to use the RAK2245 HAT we need a special OS / firmware installed on the Raspberry Pi. Then we need to do some configurations in The Things Network console.
> Preparing the SD card
We can download the OS image from the RAK Wireless's website. There are two separate versions: one for Raspberry Pi 4 and one for Raspberry Pi 3/3+/
Source: LoRaWAN Gateway with RAK2245 Pi HAT and Raspberry Pi 4
