The Things Network dual-channel up&downlink gateway

Beginning of 2016 our IoT group was looking for ways in which to send sensor data to our cloud servers. At that time we found TheThingsNetwork (in short TTN), which is based on LoRa, to be a good choice to start with.

Next step was to setup a gateway that would be usable within our offices but also at home and customer sites to work and demonstrate. That’s why we decided to build our own low-cost gateways. One of the downsides of such so-called single channel gateways is the fact that they do not support the full channels and SF spectrum of the TTN. So we looked a bit further and found a Raspberry Pi Hat that can support 2-channels.

This Raspberry Pi Hat is manufactured and sold by Uputronics: Raspberry Pi+ LoRa(TM) Expansion Board

Somewhere in April we started on developing the Uputronics gateway version of the single channel gateway made by Thomas Telkamp and it was finished beginning of May 2016. This was still the single channel one and shortly after we modified the code so it could support both RFM95 chips for 2 downlink channels.

Later in 2016, we wanted to demonstrate uplink functionality to the TTN network as well so we adapted yet again the code so it would support up and downlink and also some extra features, including:

• Config file for Pin definition, network interface (eth0/wlan0)
• Service for systemd (debian jessie minimal)
• Install service using make install and make uninstall
• Control for On board Led’s CE0, CE1 activity, Internet and Lan sensing
• Sensing network interface connectivity
• Counter for packets received and sent since last start
• Downlink support in a separate thread
• LoRA functions in separate file
• Compile time variables in header file
• Will support ABP and OTAA (latter not completely due to channel restraint)

You can download the Gateway software from Github here: link