lorawan gateways tutorial | lora LoraWAN | What are LoRaWAN gateways?

hey yo what is up guys archers here back with another video and today we'll be looking at different lorawan gateways we'll be understanding what is the difference between laura and laura and what is the difference between node a lora node and laura gateway do you really need a gateway in your applications which type of gateway to choose what are the different types of gateways that are present how can you achieve the maximum range on laura what are gateway channels uh we'll be looking at these two pre-made gateways that we have from draghino these are lorawan gateways this is the gateway that we had made one year back on our channel it's a single channel laura gateway that we have made and this is the laura bass node that we took a look at recently so if you're interested in understanding what essentially a lorawan gateway is stay tuned to this video it's christmas time and pcb gogo launches the greatest sale for the new year during december pcb gogo will choose one lucky order every day which will be given free of charge pcb gogo is offering the biggest coupons for this year along with some surprise gifts with your pcb orders if you're new to pcb gogo you can get a 50 of coupon do not forget to follow pcb gogo on twitter to enter their christmas giveaways scan the qr code on the screen or head over to the link in the video description box below so firstly let's understand what is laura laura is a radio frequency based communication protocol it typically ranges in three frequency bands that is 433 megahertz 868 megahertz and 915 megahertz it is a low power long range communication protocol and that is why it is pretty famous because the distances that you can achieve using laura are in hundreds of kilometers we'll be talking about the range and distance later in the video so just like wi-fi wherein you transmit information over radio frequency of 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz lora is also used to transmit data or set up a communication between two uh lora modules in this case we have two reacts lora modules of 868 megahertz you can transmit small information between these two modules and that can achieve a very large range wherein you can these two modules can be separated by hundreds of kilometers and still the communication will be going on this is obviously not a paid network like the cellular network that we have currently but laura is not limited to point-to-point communication it has a broadcasting mode as well wherein the information transmitted by this module can be read by this and this module simultaneously at the same time and this number is not limited to two you can have as many modules as you want to receive the information transmitted by a lora transmitter all the modules that we have over here are transceivers as they can transmit and receive lora information both at the same time now you may understand that the information that is circulated within this network remains in the lora frequency band and remains in the lora network when we need to connect this lora network to any other network like the internet it becomes laura van or laura based wide area network so when you connect lora modules to the internet somehow and transfer the data present on the lora network to the internet that becomes lorawan this is where a lora based gateway comes into play so a lora gateway if you may say like this one consists of two types of hardware one is a lora based chip and another is an internet providing chip the lora base chip is somewhat similar to this wherein it can interface to other lora based devices collect the information from the lora network or lora based devices transmit it to the internet based chip and because the internet-based chip is connected to the internet it can transfer the data coming from the laura chip to the server and vice versa as well wherein some information that is present in the internet on a server you can transmit that information from the server to first the internet chip and then from the internet ship to the laura chip and from the laura chip to the lora network that is how a gateway bridges the gap between lora network and the internet and hence creates a wide area network which is called a lorawan network so when your lora network is connected to the internet you call it as a lorawan network whereas if it's a standalone lora network not connected to the internet it becomes a lora network now if we see in the diy gateway that we had made we had a ra02 which is a 433 megahertz based lauren chip and we have an esp8266 that is all about it that we had over here the esp82660 over here as you might have guessed is the internet providing chip when this circuit gets powered on this can gets connected to the internet and the rs02 gets connected to the lora network there's this bridge of wires that connects this laura chip to the esp8266 this satisfies a basic need of a gateway wherein all the information on the lora network gets captured by the and gets transmitted to the internet using the connection to the internet provided by the esp8266 and that is how a basic gateway works and if you may see and try to open the uh professional gateways that we have from dragino the internals are similar the the laura chips and the wi-fi chips used inside these are better than the esp8266 and the rs02 because obviously this is a diy gateway and these are professional gateways over here now you can connect it not only through a wi-fi but you can connect an ethernet wire wire coming from your router which has internet access over here and the job will be done so that is the basic working of a lorawan gateway now connecting the gateway to the server is an interesting part because you can do it by yourself by manually hard coding things on your gateway having your own server set up but with the popularity of lauravan there are some servers that have been become really popular one of this is the things network or which in short say the ttn the ttn is one of the famous servers where you can put your data for free you can uh connect your gateway to the things network you can use other people's gateway for transmitting your data as well so it's a pretty cool server platform that you should use in case you're in laura van technology the next one is the thinkspeak platform the things peak platform is also a very famous uh platform for us hobbyist i've done a wi-fi based video on the thingspeak network you can find it from over here this is also a really cool platform moving on we have the mqtt so mqtt is a type of a server you can find any good named mqtt server wherein you can connect your lora based gateway to and exchange information mqtt servers are pretty fast because they require small messages and it's a pretty cool messaging service i've done on video on the mqtt as well do check it out on my channel so that is how you can connect your gateway to your server i've done a lot of videos configuring the dragino gateways to the things network and you can find that video linked over here so there can be different types of gateways that we have uh one type of gateway is defined on the basis of position wherein we have the outdoor gateways and then we have the indoor gateways the outdoor gateways are weatherproof gateway so you will have some the the hardware the internal hardware remains the same the outer packaging of the gateway becomes more robust and weatherproof it's ip68 rated gateway this one is an indoor gateway this is not an outdoor gateway whereas as you see in the indoor gateway you have some vents there's not enough weatherproofing you just need to keep it indoors if water goes into these gateways it will fry them off whereas the outer gateways are the gateways that you can see on placed on towers or on top of buildings and these are pretty good for uh when you need to place a gateway outdoor placing a gateway outdoors is gives a huge advantage of range because if you place a gateway indoor when it's surrounded by walls the walls attenuate the lora signal a lot and that is why the range decreases so i'll suggest getting an outdoor gateway or you can plant an indoor gateway outdoors with a good amount of casing on top of it the second type of distinction wherein you can choose a different type of gateways is on the basis of channels the number of channels that a gateway has there is a single channel gateway and then then we have multi-channel gateway starting from two channels up to 16 32 64 channels what a channel basically means is the the the number of ways or the number of frequencies that a particular gateway supports at one time or the number of messages from different devices that a gateway can take into mostly a single channel gateway has only one laura chip like this one this one is also a single channel gateway so at a time the ga these gateways can communicate with only one laura based device outside of this gateway whereas multi-channel gateway is somewhat like this one this is an eight channel gateway this can communicate simultaneously with eight laura devices at one time so definitely if you have more than one laura node that you're playing with or interfacing to your gateway then you should have a multi-channel gateway or you will be missing messages coming from different nodes while talking about node what a node means in the laura terminology a node is a small is a simple device that is transmitting or receiving lora based data so for example we have this gps tracker i recently did a video on this do check this out this gps tracker transmits information the gps location information on a laura on a laura spectrum and this is caught by a lorawan gateway when the lorawan gateway receives that that information it sends some acknowledgement messages which is read by the node back again so that is what i mean by a node the node can be anything from a door lock to your car sensors or to your sensors in your farm if you say the node and the gateway are different in a manner that the gateway has the internet facility whereas the node only has the lora based facility so why would you need a gateway in your application so the answer lies in the question itself if you require to see your data not only on the local network but on a wide area network for example you want to see the data reported by your lora nodes on your smartphone or on your computer you need to transfer that data on the internet and for transmitting or bridging the gap between the lora network and the internet you will have to use a lora based gateway so if in your application you're confused just ask yourself if you need to see your data on the internet or not if the answer is yes then the answer is yes to buying a gateway and setting up a gateway otherwise you're good to go one thing which i get a lot of questions about is about the range of the laura because laura promises a long range and yes to keep the answer simple a range of up to 700 kilometers has been obtained over laura this is the world record currently of getting or receiving a message transmitted from a laura chip on over 700 kilometers but that was a pretty ideal situation with the hot air balloon going in air their wing entire line of sight and all that so this is not the range that we generally expect out of laura i have personally gotten eight kilometers very easily in the in my uh city with some obstruction in between but the range depends on some various factors the first and foremost factor uh on which the range depends is the power of the laura module there are lora modules starting from 25 milliwatts or 200 milliwatts and going up to 1 watt and there are higher free higher power lora modules as well but they are illegal to use this one the e32 10d uh that we have that we have taken a look in the past as well as the 100 milliwatt module the eight kilometers range that i was talking about i had achieved it with the one watt module again the e32 one watt module is what i had used so the power of the transceiver the lora transceiver that you're using definitely matters when you're talking about the range of that you can achieve over laura the second factor that we talk about while depe on the range is the antenna so antenna power is something that you you need to be concerned about while you're concerned about the range you can go with a small antenna with a small power this is i guess a 3 db antenna to a big antenna like this which is a 12 db antenna so the higher the power that you use of your antenna and the better the quality of the antenna that you're using the antenna should be tuned and not go into antenna tuning right now in this video but do let me know in the comment section below if you're interested in something like that but the better the antenna tuning and the higher the power of the antenna which is matching your laura based transceiver the better the change that you will be able to achieve i had used a 5 dbi antenna when i had received this 8 kilometers range in conjunction with the 1 watt laura module the height of the lora node where you've placed the lora node is also pretty essential the higher the placement of the lora node if you're placing the lora node on your terrace you'll get the range better as compared to when it is on your ground uh level so higher the uh higher the antenna higher the placement of the lora module with the antenna the more the range that you will be getting so that is the range game that you can play with laura there are some other factors as well but those are minor factors like the line of sight the the fresnel zone fancy things like that i will not be going into much depth on that topic but definitely do let me know in the comment section below if you're interested in something like that so this is it for today's video i hope you now better understand what is laura and how is it different from laura and how can you be using laura van based gateways in your projects what are the different types and i definitely hope that you will have a better knowledge on this subject post watching this video i've done a long series on laura based videos on my channel with different builds like this one looking at the gateways different types of modules do check that playlist out from over here and do let me know in the comment section below your thoughts on this video that's it from my site for today thanks for watching subscribe to our channel if you haven't till now also hit the bell icon to stay notified this is our first signing off [Music] bye

Channel: CETech

Views: 50,587

Keywords: lora, gps, lorawan, dragino, gateway, channel, LG01-P, things network, ttn, mqtt, long range, LoRa, camera, esp32, rf, radio, transmission, semtech, Ai, lora gps tracker, lps8, lgt92, 8channel

Id: avGefKfQ0AI

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020