With assistance of the STEM Education resources from the Port Adelaide Enfield Libraries, I have been investigating LoRaWAN devices, how to build them and how they can be used.

There is more investigation to be done, but the node shown in the picture above is able to do the following:

• Connect and Authenticate to a LoRaWAN network (The Things Network) via Over The Air Authentication (OTAA); and
• Send data (Uplink) and Receive data (Downlink) via the LoRaWAN Gateway(s). (Downlink data is queued, and is received in a window after Uplink data has been received by the network. This reduces power usage in the node.)

The Node used was the Gragino Arduino Shield (or clone from duinotech)

The Gateway is the uGateway LoRaWAN from Core Electronics. Having a local gateway is not necessary if there is another one in the neighbourhood, within range of your node. There are currently no nodes in my area so an internal gateway was required for development and testing. The other option was to take the Node for a drive in the car after a development session, but this made debugging very tiresom, very quickly.

There are a couple of other useful tools worth mentioning.

TTN Mapper is an Android application that will monitor your device on your smart phone, via The Things Network. It then used your phones GPS to log the position of your device. The result is that you can map the coverage of nearby gateways by using your LoRaWAN node and phone in a similar way to how Wireless Access points used to be mapped (WarDriving). This is useful for knowing where your nodes have TTN access, and where additional gateways might be required.