On 21 Feb 2024, deon said the following...
Do you have any details on your setup?
I have some LoRA stuff here, that I was playing with last year. I was wanting to learn how it all worked, I did get messages being sent to devices at each end of my house, with chirpstack, but didnt get beyond that.
I'd be happy to set it up again - getting messages sent between systems, but alas with a internet link in the middle... (I dont know anybody
close by either...)
I was playing with having the two radios talk directly with each other. I thought about trying to put a pi at my in-laws house which is ~9.2km away but would require towers and directional antennas, too much money/effort for a "huh, that's neat" kind of project.
I bought two "Adafruit LoRa Radio Bonnet with OLED - RFM95W @ 915MHz" to use with two Pi's I have here.
It uses Python scripts to send/receive messages, the examples for this board are here:
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-radio-bonnets/sending-data-using-a-lora-rad io
I found this example for converting a JPG image into base64 and then breaking it up into chunks to send over a LoRa radio:
https://lowpowerlab.com/forum/general-topics/transmitting-images-with-raspberry -pi/#msg22549
And modified/combined it with some bash scripts so that if it found a .PKT
file in a directory, to send it over the LoRa radio to the other side which
is always listening.
One interesting thing I noticed with the receiving node is that it would pickup a lot of chatter from things nearby, I'm not sure if they were even LoRa radios, they might have just been other things on 900MHz. I was able to get around this by having it only accept packets from a specific node.
Here are the scripts I frankenstein'ed together:
https://nrbbs.net/lora.zip
(I'm not a programmer, don't judge me too harshly...) ;)
I didn't use the base64 encoding as it made the data to send ~35% larger, so opted to send the raw .zip'ed packet instead. This is fine as long as the packet is .zip'ed. I use various stings for certain things (e.g. !FILENAME!d5f46106.pkt or !ROK!) which if appearing in message text would mess things up. Maybe something like yenc (or more obscure strings)
would work better.
It works under ideal conditions, but is certainly not ready for primetime. It does have some error correction and integrity checking built-in but won't always restart/resend files that have failed. It also sometimes hangs if certain LoRa packets aren't acknowledged. I was able to get some ftn packets to flow automagically (with Mystic's directory tossing) which was good enough for me.
Jay
... Shout out to my fingers. I can count on all of them
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