41–50 of 109 posts
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Killer -- where's your hackerspace? LoRa basestation gateways are available off-the-shelf for from Kerlink, Multitech, and Link Labs. The gateways are actually quite simple, they just forward packets to the cloud network server, and back to the clients.
Mesa, AZ. http://www.heatsynclabs.org/
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Compromise is you'll get a few bits to 1kbps at best over a few Km of range. It would work for some applications but not for all of them.
Is that 1kbps shared between all devices in range?
Other technologies can have many more simultaneously communicating devices. In the case of OnRamp/Ingenu, a factor of 1600 more due to their encoding scheme.
Narrowband technologies like SigFox (based on TI radios), have way more than 64 channels available in the US, I believe in the range of 1000, but are more susceptible to interference.
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Security in the LoRaWAN standard is well thought-through, you might be surprised.
Googling this did not lead to joy. Do you have a direct link?
Would love to hear thoughts on it. Email address in my profile.
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Glad you agree. :) We're putting up a LoRa network here in SF, and plan to publish a bunch of our test data, including link error rates and throughput. Urban deployments are new so more data will help us all understand what's doable. (There are a few rural deployments in production; less uncertainty there.)
How will you deal with device contention as the density of devices increases?
Where?
> Think kilobits-per-second, not megabits-per-second.
Well, voice is (or was...) 32kbps, so technically you could make a voice call over these radios, if they can give you 32kbps? I've heard of voice compression as low as 8kbps too. Imagine a cellphone that lasts months :)
> So now you can buy a radio chip for a few bucks and add it to any device. Where? > Think kilobits-per-second, not megabits-per-second. Well, voice is (or was...) 32kbps, so technically you could make a voice call over these radios, if they can give you 32kbps? I've heard of voice compression as low as 8kbps too. Imagine a cellphone that lasts months :)
This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…
Cool stuff, sure. But, in my opinion, IoT will be slow to take off until the security aspect is solved - and it is a tough one.
Would this open possibilities for a direct machine to machine network that didn't go over the internet? (I.e. could I set up something to ssh to my home server from my laptop without needing wifi/cellular coverage?
These new technologies/products try to solve the problem from both ends. Increasing transmit power to the max allowed. Some early Zigbee chips for instance had transmit powers of 0db, big fail. These new radios transmit 10 to 20 db output power. On the receive side reduce bandwidth to increase the sensitivity by 10-30 db, at the expense of data rate.
The cost of all this is very low bandwidth. Not just in bps, but also packets per minute due to duty cycle regulations. This poses some problems if you want encrypt your packets. Add at least 32-64 bytes overhead. Another problem is as the coverage area gets wider so does the number of interfering radio's.
+ Sometimes you hear comments that spread spectrum allows you operate below the noise floor, but that's only for the spread signal. Once the signal is despread at the receiver, same rules apply.
Lower power, but highly processed radio signals are fascinating to me. I've been playing with WSPR on the 10 meter band which is fixing (hopefully) to open up a little here over the next couple of months. With about 1/10th of the power of my Wi-Fi router and a long wire over top of the house, I've been picked up so far this year in California from Ohio. Last year I was heard almost daily in Europe. A blogger I follow…
This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…