Chirpstack News - From Beginners to Mesh

Speaker: 00:00:07

Today's guest

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on MeteoScientific's

The business of LoRaWAN is Orne

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: 00:00:11

Brocaar, the founder

and lead developer of Chirpstack, the open

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source LoRaWAN network server

used in deployments around the world.

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Since launching Chirpstack in 2015,

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Orne has played a foundational role

in the LoRaWAN ecosystem.

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His work has made it possible

for organizations from conservation

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groups in Africa

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to enterprise IoT teams in Europe

and beyond to run LoRaWAN networks

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without depending on proprietary systems

or commercial locking.

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With over 2 million downloads,

Chirpstack is one of

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the most widely used LoRaWAN servers

globally.

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In today's episode,

we talk through some of the most common

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pain points new users face.

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What's coming next for Chirpstack,

including a powerful new relay based

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gateway mesh, and how Orne balances

the demands of running a global

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used open source project

while staying commercially sustainable.

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Whether you're

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deploying thousands of sensors

or just spinning up your first Raspberry

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Pi gateway, this conversation will help

you understand where Chirpstack

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fits in the business of Lorette

and where it's headed next.

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This episode is sponsored by the Helium

Foundation's IoT Working Group.

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Helium offers global LoRaWAN coverage that

you can use exclusively or roam on to.

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If you'd like to see if Helium

coverage exists near you,

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: 00:01:18

check out the links in the show notes.

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To get started using Helium today.

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And yes, it's on a Chirpstack LNS,

you can sign up for a console account

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with MeteoScientific

at console.meteoscientifc.com.

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Now let's dig into the conversation

with Orne Brocaar.

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Orne.

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Thanks so much for coming on the show.

I'm super excited to have you here.

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Thanks for the invite.

Yeah, it's really cool.

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I mean, you're an integral part

of the entire LoRaWAN system,

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so it's it's really an honor

to have you on.

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I think we would start maybe with folks

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who aren’t really familiar

with Chirpstack.

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I go through the forums,

I use it for MeteoScientific,

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so it's certainly semi familiar for me.

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What are the biggest challenges

that people have with it?

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Maybe when they're starting

or maybe what are the things you see

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all the time that people are always

asking questions about?

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Yeah, I think the great thing

about LoRaWAN, it's very open, it's

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very flexible.

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And I think also that's

where the main challenge is.

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Chirpstack is a solution

that people commonly self host,

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giving them the freedom to set it up

the way they want.

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And I think with that, it's also

where the main challenge is

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people

are using different types of hardware.

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They're using it

on many different systems.

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And with chipsets.

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You need to know a bit about LoRa LoRaWAN,

how to set up the gateway,

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how to set up a server,

the network architecture.

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And I think that especially users

that think, hey LoRa,

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it's a cool technology,

but they don't have the background

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in setting up a Linux server

or setting up firewall rules.

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That's where you're usually beginning

users are struggling with

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to get the whole setup up and running.

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So what you typically see on that forum

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is that people say, hey,

I bought this gateway.

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I think I set up correctly on the server,

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but I don't see any data or hey,

my gateway is connected.

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I try to connect the device,

but it doesn't work.

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And yeah, usually on the forum, myself

or other people from the community

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try to reach out

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helping them with, okay,

have you tried debugging that the gateway.

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For example, is actually connected

to the network server.

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Do you see any traffic at this point?

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And well, try to narrow down

where the issue might come from.

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Yeah, it's always tough.

It's like it doesn't work.

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And you're like, well, what doesn't work

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and what let's let's follow

that signal chain and figure it out.

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But it is

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I mean, that's a cool thing about LoRaWAN

is that it's both open

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and also technical.

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So you can be really curious

and learn a bunch about it.

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And there are very few bars to you

to learning stuff.

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Okay.

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So the problem

a lot of the times with open businesses

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is they don't make any money

because it's open.

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You're just giving the thing away.

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How does your business work?

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Right.

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You're kind of at the

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heart of this business of LoRaWAN piece,

what do people hire you for?

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In summary, it works out really well.

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Chirpstack is a project that I started

late: 2015

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Initially, it was kind of a

a side project besides contracting work

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that I was doing at that time in 2016,

it was still something

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I was doing on the site.

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But already in 2017, it started becoming

a full time business initially.

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I've been working together with CableLabs.

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They're a research development

organization in the US.

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They have been contributing a lot

to the Chirpstack project.

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Project about funding from the SIDN funds,

which is a fund

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in the Netherlands for projects

that strengthen the internet.

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And these two things have been giving a

huge kickstart to the project since then.

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And that that was around the time that

people were still doing proof of concepts.

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Companies were kind of looking at LoRaWAN,

but there were not really budgets

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to do anything.

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But these two collaborations

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and fundings have been giving quite

a kickstart to the project.

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After that, slowly companies

started investing in LoRa.

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When they started looking into

what Chirpstack could do for them,

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I started doing some consultancy work

for some companies.

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Some companies have been contributing

financially to implementing features.

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Yeah, that's how has been going until now.

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Mostly like my week is filled

with consultancy work, work

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that I do for companies.

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And part of the week

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I just have my own kind of backlog

of items that I want to to work on.

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Besides that, there are also companies

supporting the project

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through GitHub sponsors,

and this whole combination of consultancy

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doing work

contracted by companies and sponsors.

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Yeah, we're a little sponsor.

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I mean, it's five bucks a month.

It's not much.

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But I was like, I remember

when I saw I was like, this is super cool.

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I'd like to contribute

a little bit to it.

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So it's always been it's neat

that you get that. You allow that.

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Okay. So very straightforward

kind of business piece.

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You figure this thing out, you founded it,

you put it on the internet

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and people like, hey,

it is big and complicated.

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I'll hire you to help me, or I'll hire

to develop the specific thing around it.

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It seems like it's everywhere.

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I don't know

if you have any insight into this,

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but what do you think the penetration

of Chirpstack is across LoRaWAN?

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Like what?

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Maybe

what percentage of LNS are Chirpstacks?

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Yeah,

that's a very hard question to answer

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since many people are using Chirpstack

and only a small percentage

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comes back to me which questions are

which consultancy questions?

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What I can see is that Chirpstack version

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three has been downloaded over

1 million times.

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Holy smokes. Chirpstack version

four as well.

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So these two versions together

and version four is the latest version.

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These two versions in total have been

download more than 2 million times.

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It doesn't include,

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of course, people that's re downloading

or if you are running it on Kubernetes,

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and one of the notes goes down

or you do an update.

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So it's not equal to the number of users,

but it does

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well reflect

that people are using Chirpstack a lot.

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And it's interesting.

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It's interesting that there's no way,

I mean, for me is kind of a semi

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non-technical person, that there's

no way for one person to see, like,

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okay, there are currently,

you know, 422,917

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active downloads, like, nope, that's

just it's out there and it's working.

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Okay.

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You said that most of the week

you were consulting for other folks.

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And then part of the week

you work on the backlog.

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What's kind of next for you in Chirpstack?

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Where are you looking at and what can

the rest of us look forward to?

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One of the new things that's and actually,

this is something I work together

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with RAK and Smart Parks

is the the gateway mesh.

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It's a solution especially more

for rural areas to extend LoRaWAN offers.

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The LoRa

Alliance has a relay specification,

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but in some areas it doesn't work well.

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It requires you to update the firmware

of the devices to be compatible

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with this relay specification and well,

in some cases that's just not possible.

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So together with RAK and Smart Parks,

we've been developing,

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what's called the gateway mesh as well,

that has been open source.

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And one of the new things

that has been added recently,

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and that's like in terms of weeks

ago is a way.

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So just to explain a little bit

how this works, you have relay gateways

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that can be solar powered and just running

without any internet connections

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that are not accessible at all.

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One of the things I've been building

is a way to send commands

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to these gateways over proprietary

LoRaWAN messages,

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so I'm using the proprietary message type

for that.

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So that doesn't interfere

with the other LoRaWAN messages.

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And yeah,

this basically gives a whole framework

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where you can assign commands or configure

commands on these relay gateways.

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And then with the right payload, it

will be delivered at these relay gateways.

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And that command

that you configured can be executed.

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So this provides like a framework

for reconfiguration.

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I wouldn't say it's suitable

for updates since.

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Well you have to deal with the constraints

of what you can send using LoRaWAN.

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But that would help you, for example,

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to read out settings or change

settings on the gateway.

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There is also an event framework

that I created that can,

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for example, help

to read out, the charts of the battery.

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How well the,

the solar panel is functioning,

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how much energy

it's providing to the battery, etc..

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So this is one of the new things

I've been recently working on that that's

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still something that we are still step

by step are improving.

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So it's really like a kind of gateway

as a device.

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If I'm thinking of this like a normal

LoRaWAN sensor will send you, hey,

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here's my battery voltage, here's

what I'm sensing.

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You know, solar panel, whatever.

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And this is just

it sounds like from, from my perspective

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that it's the gateway can kind of do two

things is one is it

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can receive signals

and then send them send them on to you.

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And then the other thing is it

can say like, hey, I've got this problem,

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or you can reconfigure me in that way,

just like a normal device.

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It's not really like, yeah, it's it's

part of a, kind of device.

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So on on each of these relay gateways,

there is a small service

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running a software

stack to run this gateway mesh.

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So the cool thing about

this is the devices, they don't know that

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they're running within a mesh network

at the end of the chain,

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the network server,

it gets some additional metadata.

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But when we develops the gateway mesh,

there were zero

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changes required at the Chirpstack side

to make this work.

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So in the end, the network server

just gets the LoRaWAN payload.

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And this gateway mesh

encapsulated the uplink frames.

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And at the end of the chains, it

decapsulates

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this wrapper and just exposed as a normal.

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So yeah, there are a couple of things

that you I think over

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time of the lifetime of Relay Gateway

might want to change.

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So for example,

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one of the configurations like the maximum

hops that a relay would accept.

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So you can say, okay,

if it passes more than three

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hops just drop it and don't retransmit it.

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If you find out why, actually we need

more hops or we need less than this frame,

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or could be used to change this

this hop comms setting.

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Okay.

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But this goes really deep into the the

the gateway mesh.

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But yeah, it provides a, a framework

for this configuration, these,

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relay gateways. Right.

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And I mean, you're basically

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just keeping up with the hardware

and firmware of LoRa saying, hey,

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you guys are using this stuff.

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I want to make sure that the tool

that I've built

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is applicable to all this stuff

and isn't stuck in: 2020

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the last time there's an update. Okay.

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Very cool.

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If someone wants to get started with

Chirpstack, you started the whole thing.

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You’ve seen a bunch of people start on it.

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What would you say

the best ways to to begin?

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You know, just kind of buying a gateway

and fiddling around here.

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So one of the easiest thing I would say

is buy one of these raspberry Pi kits.

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So there are different vendors

that sell them, RAK., Dragino, Seeed.

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There are a couple of more.

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So it's basically a Raspberry

Pi with the shields,

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with the LoRa concentrator on it.

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Yep. On the website

you will find the gateway OS.

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I support different Raspberry Pi versions.

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And you download the the full image.

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You put it on the SD card, you put it in.

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As soon as you turn on the Raspberry Pi,

it starts as a,

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access point so you can directly connect

from your computer to it.

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It comes with preconfigured apps.

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The only thing you need to do is go to the

the concentrator setting, select

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which shield you're using,

it will automatically configure the,

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the pin settings, etc.

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correctly, and it will set the region.

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And you should be ready to just

use Chirpstack from the Raspberry Pi.

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I think that's a great start

since you don't have to fiddle with VMs

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with network access, and after that,

once you are happy with that,

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you can move it to a VM

and start scaling up.

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But I think it's a good first introduction

into Chirpstack

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Okay, so basically

it addresses the very first question,

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which is like what's the most common thing

you get is the configuration piece need.

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And you must have thought to yourself

like, okay,

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I got to figure this out where I make

it really easy to onboard people.

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And actually

it was really in the beginning,

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it was a lot of people were buying

Raspberry Pi's to get started.

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Yeah, that's how I got started.

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But you need to figure out

what's the pin mapping.

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Where is the reset pin,

if the, the concentrator module

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has the DNS module, usually it conflicts

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with where the Bluetooth modules

mapped on the Raspberry Pi.

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Well, you need to make a few settings

on the Raspberry Pi OS to get this work.

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And with the gateway OS, it's

basically what we try to minimize

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the number of steps that are needed to

to get this work.

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Now, is that something I can use on

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a server

that's not going to be a gateway as well?

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Is there a kind of a pretty easy thing

for that?

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So I'm like,

all set up a little server in my house,

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and then I'll throw these gateways

around the neighborhood or the area.

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Can I do the same thing,

or is is this really focused on, hey,

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kind of one gateway?

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Is the server like the whole things

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in one physical package

or am I misunderstanding?

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No, it’s for,

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so I think technically you could take one

Raspberry Pi as a server and connect

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other gateways to it, but as it's designed

now, it's more like,

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yeah, just a gateway

plus the network server embedded.

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There's also support

for some compute module for base gateways.

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So it's yeah,

you would run the whole stack just on that

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single box,

including the the concentrator module.

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And then you could add more like simpler

gateways to it's just forwarding the data,

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but it's not really intended

to run on the server.

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It's really like more on ARM and MIPs

based devices.

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Okay. Super, super cool.

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I've got a ton

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some more questions for you on Helium

but I know because I know

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Helium was a big part

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of the kind of explosive growth of LoRaWAN

and introducing a bunch of

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new people to it.

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And certainly the Chirpstack tech

gets used in Helium all the time.

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Like I said, I'm using it,

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but I don't want to waste of time

trying to take up a ton of your time.

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I really appreciate you coming on.

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I know you're super busy with Chirpstack,

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so thanks for making the time

to talk to us today.

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Thanks again for the invite. Heck yeah.

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That's it for

this episode of The Business of LoRaWAN.

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I built this for you.

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So whether you're a business owner,

a LoRaWAN professional, or a hobbyist,

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the intent is to give you great LoRaWAN

information.

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Of course,

the best information doesn't come from me.

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It comes from the conversations

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we have with the people building

and deploying this tech in the real world.

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And that's where you come in.

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LoRaWAN is a global

patchwork of talent and ideas.

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And ironically,

for a globally connected network,

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most of the brilliant folks working on it

aren’t connected yet.

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Help me change that.

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Introduce me

to someone awesome in your network,

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: 00:15:30

someone doing meaningful work in LoRaWAN

work.

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: 00:15:32

Just shoot me a name.

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: 00:15:33

I'll take it from there

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: 00:15:34

and get them on the show

so we can share their work with the world.

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: 00:15:37

You can always find me at metsci.show

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: 00:15:40

That's M-E-T-S-C-I dot

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: 00:15:43

S-H-O-W, metsci.show.

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: 00:15:47

If you want to support the show

in other ways, you can subscribe,

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: 00:15:49

leave a review,

share it with your corner of the world.

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: 00:15:51

All those are super helpful.

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: 00:15:53

If you'd like to support financially,

you can go to support.metsci.show

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: 00:15:58

for both one time and recurring options.

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: 00:16:00

We're also open to sponsors.

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: 00:16:01

If your company serves

the LoRaWAN community

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: 00:16:03

and you want to reach this dedicated

audience, let's talk

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: 00:16:07

if you want to try LoRaWAN for yourself.

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: 00:16:08

Create a MeteoScientific account

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: 00:16:10

at console.meteoscientific.comand

get your first 400 DC for free,

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: 00:16:15

which is enough to run a device

sending hourly for about a year.

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: 00:16:19

This show is supported

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: 00:16:20

by a grant from the Helium Foundation

and produced by Gristle King, Inc..

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: 00:16:24

I'm Nik Hawks.

I'll see you on the next show.