Running OpenWRT on the Pine64 LoRa Gateway

Sunday, October 13, 2024

Pine64 offers a LoRa gateway built around their Pine A64-LTS SBC. I was fortunate enough to receive an engineering sample from Pine64, allowing me to test the gateway and provide a custom OS image before it became available for purchase. RTP (@RTP on Fosstodon ) later created a custom image based on Armbian, which worked well. I’ve been running one of RTP’s early image for a few years now. It’s connected on the TTN (The Things Network) , and I use it to get the data from my LoRa water meter .…

Install Frigate in Proxmox on the OrangePi5+ (RK3588)

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

I’ve already tried in the past to run some NVRs to monitor surveillance camera on ARM SBC, but the performances were a bit underwhelming : it was too slow, it would miss events while it was recording the previous ones, and the CPU would be maxed out all of the time. But I reconsidered this with the RK3588 since it’s way more powerful than the other SBCs I had the opportunity to use so far.…

Install Armbian and Proxmox on the OrangePi5+ (RK3588)

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Introduction I’ve been using ARM based SBCs (RaspberryPi, Odroid, Quartz64, NanoPi) as home servers for quite some time now. I use them to host my NAS, backups, Home-Assistant, MQTT broker, Matrix home server… ARM CPUs are becoming more and more powerful, support more and more memory and provide more and more I/Os, which enable new use-cases and functionalities. The Rockchip RK3588 is probably one of the most powerful of such CPU that are available to the general public.…

DIY low-power LoRa water-meter - Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant

Saturday, August 5, 2023

This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Now that the device is built and the firmware is running as expected, let’s see how to actually use it and get the measurements out of the sensor! As a reminder, the device counts pulses from the watermeter and sends the data (message number, battery voltage and number of pulses detected) to TTN using LoRaWAN technology.…

DIY low-power LoRa water-meter - Part 4 : Software

Saturday, August 5, 2023

This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Software The code is fully open source and available on my Codeberg account . The firmware is written in C, and mostly relies on two 3rd party libraries : LoRaMac-node and LittleFS.…

DIY low-power LoRa water-meter - Part 3 : Hardware design

Saturday, August 5, 2023

This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Hardware design Important notice : I’m a software engineer, and I have very limited knowledge and experience in anything related to hardware design and electronics. I can read a datasheet and a schematics, and I can plug components on a breadboard.…

DIY low-power LoRa water-meter - Part 2 : From prototypes to the final product

Saturday, August 5, 2023

This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant As I previously said, I started this project more than 2 years ago. I obviously didn’t work on it full time since then, but I nevertheless tried many solutions to implement my idea.…

DIY low-power LoRa water-meter - Part 1 : Introduction

Saturday, August 5, 2023

This blog post is part of a series of posts: Part 1 : Introduction Part 2 : From prototypes to V1.0 Part 3 : Hardware design Part 4 : Software Part 5 : Integration with TTN, Node-RED and Home-Assistant Introduction My water consumption increased by a lot (+20%) in 2020-2021. Even if water isn’t the most expensive of my utility bills, I was still a bit concerned : maybe there’s leak in my water installation.…

The state of the QuartzPro64 in February 2023

Monday, February 27, 2023

In the previous article , I detailed all the steps I took to get started with the QuartzPro64, and I ended up with a Linux system running on kernel 6.1 (this commit from neggles’ linux-quartz64 branch ). In this article, I would like to go into more details on the current status of the software in (nearly) mainline Linux. Note that things related to the RK3588 and the QuartzPro64 are moving fast and that the content of this post will probably become obsolete quite soon!…

Getting started with the QuartzPro64

Saturday, February 25, 2023

The QuartzPro64 is an ARM SBC from Pine64 built around the new Rockchip RK3588 CPU. Before going any further, let me remind you that this board is not available to the general public. This is a development board that is only for developers who want to contribute to software development : mainline support in the Linux kernel, Linux distributions, projects,… Pine64 will probably design a board similar to their other SBCs (like the ROCKPro64 ) when the software support will be good enough for general uses.…