pyGate-forwarder

[eCOnect] is a European project about biodiversity study in Occitanie (south of France). We'll deploy sensors across large areas and we need a (cheap) way to gather all the data: LoRaWAN :) To achieve this, we make use of the (great)PyGate boards (https://pycom.io/product/pygate/) as a (cheap) true 8 channels LoRaWAN packet forwarder: we directly connected our Nvidia Jetson Nano to the PyGate board through SPI bus.

However, while this works seamlessly when connecting a RPi to a PyGate, it turns out to a total mess on Jetson nano ?!?!

SPOILER: the reason lies in the fact that SPI on nano does not releases the CS line ... thus SX1308 still waits before executing the received write operation!

Getting started

Reminder: both 'lora_gateway' and 'packet_forwarder' are forks from Semtech version (https://github.com/Lora-net/lora_gateway https://github.com/Lora-net/packet_forwarder)

Compilation

cd lora_gateway
make

WARNING on Nvidia Jetson Nano, you ought to use make CFLAGS=-DNVIDIA_CS_WORKAROUND This stems from a bug in the SPI driver.

cd packet_fowarder
make

Gateway setup

cd packet_fowarder/lora_pkt_fwd
cp ~/pyGate-forwarder/{global,local}_conf.json .
./update_gwid.sh

The update_gwid.sh script will generate a new LoRaWAN gateway mac address and update json local file.

It's now time for you to modifiy this local file to head your packet forwarder to your LoRaWAN server
You ought now to add this new gateway to your LoRaWAN server (we make use of gotthardp version https://github.com/gotthardp/lorawan-server)

packet_forwarder start :)

[MANDATORY] Reset the board

./reset_pygate.py

... then start packet forwarder

cd packet_forwarder/lora_pkt_fwd
./lora_pkt_fwd

and TADA, it works! (at least it ought to ;)

systemd service

To start our packet forwarder as a systemd service

./setup.sh