Micro LoRa Gateway

Summary

Company: Personal Use Side Project
Tasks: Electrical Design, PCB Design,  Hand Assembly of Prototypes, Software
Date: First produced December 2020
Status: On hiatus.

Overview

I was interested in making an as cheap as possible gateway that could potentially be distributed to clients, this would be the bare minimum required for a easy to manage LoRa gateway.

Targeted for novice users the only setup required is to copy a file with Wireless LAN configuration settings and that's all that is required. The rest of the configuration regarding the LoRa aspect is done over the internet and at boot it contacts a server with it's serial number and the server responds with the frequency plan, LoRa servers to connect to and any other configuration required.

The hardware is rather simple using a Raspberry Pi Zero, a RAK2247 or RAK833 LoRa Module, linear regulator and 5V Input for power.

A USB B Connector was chosen due to it's robustness over other connectors, in experience it's harder to find a poor quality USB A to USB B cable than it is to find a poor quality USB A to Micro USB B cable. This resolves the issue of poor cables being used to power the device.

4 LEDs are used to provide the user feedback as to power, what stage of bootup, internet connectitivy and that the LoRa Module is working.