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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 .…
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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.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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.…
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A driver for the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone
Thursday, November 25, 2021
In previous articles, I introduced the LoRa blackplate for the Pinephone and I flashed the onboard MCU with an SPI<->I²C bridge firmware . In this post, I’ll write a driver that allows the Pinephone to send ant receive LoRa messages via this LoRa backplate! How to communicate with the SX1262 ? The SX1262 (LoRa radio) is an SPI chip. As the pogo pins only expose and I²C bus, the Pinephone cannot communicate directly with the radio.…
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Flashing the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
In the previous article about the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone , I introduced the devices and tried to understand how it was supposed to work (I received the devices with no instructions at all). I made a few assumptions regarding the pinout of the pogo pads and of the wires that were soldered on one of the board by looking at the PCB, at the schematics and at the source code of the bridge (I²C <-> SPI) firmware that is linked on the wiki :…
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First look at the LoRa backplate for the Pinephone
Sunday, November 14, 2021
The LoRa backplate for the Pinephone A few months ago, Pine64 sent me a few prototypes of their new devices from the PineDio range. PineDio is the name of LoRa based devices : The PineDio STACK : a development board based on the BL604 RISC-V MCU, equipped with the SX1262 LoRa module The PineDio Gateway : a LoRa gateway based on the Pine A64 SBC and the RAK2287 LoRa concentrator The PineDio USB adapter : a USB adapter to the Sx1262 LoRa module The PineDio LoRa backplate for the Pinephone I’ve already shared some information about the gateway on this blog and about the USB adapter on the Pine64 wiki .…
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Discovering the Pine64 LoRa gateway
Friday, May 14, 2021
Pine64 has been mentionning LoRa on their monthly community update (in February, for example) for a few months now and it is now becoming a reality : TL, founder of Pine64 sent an engineering sample of the future Pine64 LoRa gateway to a few people from the community (myself included), and I received mine in the beginning of April. Since then, the whole “Lora” project has been named PineDIO (Pine + Radio), and Pine64 and RAK officially announced their collaboration for developping opensource LoRa hardware and software!…