First, I want to say what a pleasure it has been working with you on this project. You have done an amazing job adding mesh capabilities to the Particle library (second your request for a “pull” on your branch) and doing the hard work to get practical real world experience. I have benefitted from all you have done and, I hope, so will the rest of the Particle community.
I want to explain why I think that Particle is a great platform for LoRA development. I believe this could be a big benefit to the platform - even as public LoRAWAN solutions are gaining tracking. By building a gateway based on a Boron with LoRA capabilities, you have some significant advantages over LoRAWAN solutions like Helium and The Things networks for these rural implementations. @jgskarda mentioned some above but I want to repeat them and add a couple to his list:
- The gateway can also be a sensor node - this saves money and helps build a “mesh” for more distant nodes.
- This solution is available where there is no public LoRAWAN service is available.
- Private LoRAWAN implementations require gateways are not optimized for the low power use case - they cannot be programmed to “sleep” and generally have power budgets that would make solar implementations larger / more expensive than what you have have with Particle. See link below for an inexpensive LoRAWAN outdoor gateway - they can be much more expensive than this:
- A Particle gateway can take advantage of the amazing Particle API and Libraries to support connectivity, scheduling and publish to queue to name just a few.
- This solution takes a standards-based approach to LoRA so there are many options for pre-made sensors and adding LoRA modules to existing Particle projects is straight forward.
I will share more of my experiences in the coming weeks and I hope others in the community will take advantage of the great work that @jgskarda has done here.
Chip