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LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

blog.beepnetworks.com

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Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#41

Post by aceperry »

a13n wrote: post #33
phurley wrote: post #23

It does not look like your target market, but I imagine this would be ideal for pet/valuable tracking. Put it in a collar or bike seat and if your fido goes for a stroll and does not come back you can search much faster with an easy drive down the road. Same thing to help find a stolen bike. If the transmitter could be inductively charged in a dog crate or where I park my bike -- it would be very convenient too. Ping…

Seems like the police could bait bikes with this technology to make a serious dent on bike theft in their city.

You'd have to hide the antenna well to do this.

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#42

Post by dfrey »

Is it still the case that LoRa is a single vendor proprietary technology? When I looked into it a bit it seemed like only Semtech produced LoRa chips and that it wasn't an open standard like 802.11, so it is unlikely that we will see offers from other vendors.

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#43

Post by siscia »

hiddenkrypt wrote: post #37
siscia wrote: post #31

Shameless plug. I am working as consultant for a startup building a backend for LoRa devices. If you have any question from the backend software point of view feel free to write me :) email in the profile.

How does this sort of tech handle large scale use? Living in an apartment where all but one corner is in range of 60+ traditional access points has been a huge pain for my connectivity. I can only imagine it would be worse when you're in range of everybody in miles.

Honestly I am deeper in the stack, in mg understanding however, is the gateway (the thing that receive the radio message) to filter out message belonging to your network. (please note that I may be wrong)

The gateway is extremely simple it receive messages and send them to a bigger server (usually via Ethernet).

Of course the scale of your problem is dependent of the legislation... In Europe (where I work) there is a duty cycle of 1% (if you talk for 1 second you need to don't talk for the next 100 seconds).

Also keep in mind that device usually trasmit at 14 dBm WAY lower than the 27 dBm in the article. Every 3 dBm half the actual power...

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#44

Post by slewis »

dfrey wrote: post #42

Is it still the case that LoRa is a single vendor proprietary technology? When I looked into it a bit it seemed like only Semtech produced LoRa chips and that it wasn't an open standard like 802.11, so it is unlikely that we will see offers from other vendors.

I believe Microchip licensed the IP from Semtech and has made their own chips: http://www.microchip.com/design-centers/wireless-connectivit...

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#45

Post by slewis »

OrdaGarb wrote: post #34

I'm rural and have a lot of things sending data to a central node for collection. I found LoRa interesting, but sadly none of the modules offered native encryption capabilities. Ended up using RFM69HW modules with AES128 in the same band and still get pretty good range, up to a mile+ NLoS (but not through 300m hills either..) I imagine the low throughput of LoRa would make encryption a greater challenge than with oth…

LoRaWAN requires AES128: https://www.lora-alliance.org/portals/0/documents/whitepaper...

The radio chip itself doesn't perform the encryption though, it's done on the host microcontroller.

What kind of things are you monitoring?

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#46

Post by slewis »

hiddenkrypt wrote: post #37
siscia wrote: post #31

Shameless plug. I am working as consultant for a startup building a backend for LoRa devices. If you have any question from the backend software point of view feel free to write me :) email in the profile.

How does this sort of tech handle large scale use? Living in an apartment where all but one corner is in range of 60+ traditional access points has been a huge pain for my connectivity. I can only imagine it would be worse when you're in range of everybody in miles.

It's a great point. A smart network needs to scale down the transmit power of its nodes and gateways as the network density increases.

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#47

Post by slewis »

blhack wrote: post #30

As somebody working in the IoT space (specifically telemedicine), Lora is the technology that excites me the most . It really does sound like a magic bullet that really actually does solve a lot of real connectivity problems. Go beep! BTW, so, uh...hey beep, wanna sponsor a hackathon for this stuff this spring?

Thanks!

You mean in 9 months? We're hoping to do one earlier than that :). Hit me up: shawn at beepnetworks dot com

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#48

Post by siscia »

slewis wrote: post #46
hiddenkrypt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this sort of tech handle large scale use? Living in an apartment where all but one corner is in range of 60+ traditional access points has been a huge pain for my connectivity. I can only imagine it would be worse when you're in range of everybody in miles.

It's a great point. A smart network needs to scale down the transmit power of its nodes and gateways as the network density increases.

Hummm actually is more about the distance (in the radio topology) between the nodes and the gateway. Closer are the gateway to the nodes less power you need.

Re: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

#50

Post by slewis »

phurley wrote: post #23

It does not look like your target market, but I imagine this would be ideal for pet/valuable tracking. Put it in a collar or bike seat and if your fido goes for a stroll and does not come back you can search much faster with an easy drive down the road. Same thing to help find a stolen bike. If the transmitter could be inductively charged in a dog crate or where I park my bike -- it would be very convenient too. Ping…

Shawn from Beep here. It's definitely an interesting area for us. We've created a tracker demo but don't have any information on our site about it yet.

I love the idea of inductively charging the dog tracker when the dog is in bed (though we're unlikely to pull that off anytime soon given the state of wireless charging).

You can do a lot with battery life if you only turn the GPS radio on when the user wants to locate the item. This type of product requires really good network coverage. We could make one last for 4-5 months on a single AAA battery.

If you want it to check in every 10 minutes with GPS data it would only last for 3.5 days. If you get smart with an accelerometer you can push that out to 1-4 weeks or more depending on how much the thing you're tracking moves around.

It's a fun product area with lots of parameters to tweak!

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