The first new tool is lorapipe, a firmware that runs on most consumer LoRa radios.
We've tested it a ton on ESP32-S3 based Xiao Wio boards.
This turns your lora radio into extremely minimal serial device that sends and receives packets in a dirt simple CSV format.
The radio can be tuned on the fly to switch between meshcore, meshtastic and LoRaWAN sync words and frequencies.
So the problems with the TTN is basically is a SaaS capitalist play. You buy a gateway, connect it to TTN then TTN sells access back to you and your community for your own hardware 🥴
They do give a free tier and act open but your hardware and data is THEIR profit center. Lame.
It's got a lot of network coverage in the EU, but never really took off in the US.
In practice the network in the EU is viable, the one in the US isn't.
In the end TTN/LoRaWAN make a ton of sense for corporate customers or people selling IoT gear to corporate buyers.
It works well where you have coverage. It's well designed and there's tons of quality hardware, though much of it not fully open.
LoRaWAN's claim to fame is that device data connections can be as cheap as $1/year and some of the gear like soil sensors can last for 10yrs on a single coincell battery.
Some LoRa history.
First off a company called Semtech developed & patented the silicon to make LoRa radios back in 2014.
In the EU a corporate outfit, "The Things Network"(TTN), was the earliest adopter and created an open specification for a centralized LoRa network(LoRaWAN).
TTN feels a lot like a cellular network and isn't a mesh network. Suffers from the typical coporate conflicts but has a nice enough free tier and a fair bit of open source code behind it.
So the problems with the TTN is basically is a SaaS capitalist play. You buy a gateway, connect it to TTN then TTN sells access back to you and your community for your own hardware 🥴
They do give a free tier and act open but your hardware and data is THEIR profit center. Lame.
It's got a lot of network coverage in the EU, but never really took off in the US.
In practice the network in the EU is viable, the one in the US isn't.
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