Hi Everyone,
First, thanks for starting and contributing to this project. I think LoRaWAN has some huge potential and it's great that so many people are already contributing to bring this technology to mainstream.
I'm new to the project but I'd like to setup a gateway and node I can use to try it out and learn more about the platform. I've read through the documentation here and elsewhere about setting up gateway and node hardware. I wanted to summarize my plans for ordering/building gateway and node hardware so others with more experience can comment about information I might have missed or other things I should consider.
My plan is to use the Raspberry Pi as the platform for both the node and gateway as I'm already familar with this hardware/software platform and I'd like to be able to re-use as much of the hardware as possible between implementations. Cost is not a big concern on either side at the moment as I'm just trying to put together a demo platform.
I'm in the US, so I'll be using 915 MHz.
Here are my thoughts about the hardware I would order for the Gateway and Node.
Gateway
Option 1: Purchase the LoRaWAN Raspberry Pi Gateway Board. This looks like the easiest to setup, however it's currently sold out with no ETA. I've sent an email about availability. It looks like they are waiting to run more until they get hardware feedback in this forum thread. Total solution cost would be something like $275 with a $10 antenna and $35 Raspberry Pi. Software would be based off of whatever the folks in this forum thread are using, probably ttn-zh/ic880a-gateway. This would be my preferred hardware solution depending on estimated availability.
Option 2:
Use the instructions in mirakonta/lora_gateway to build a gateway based on the $170 MTAC-LORA-915. The original USB to Mini-PCIe card referenced in this article is no longer available, so I'll need to order this one for $8 instead. Hopefully the hardware hack mentioned here will still work with the new board. Adding in the same $10 antenna and $35 Raspberry Pi brings solution cost to around $230. Software will be based on the github repository at mirakonta/lora_gateway
Node
I found a nice article here comparing Raspberry Pi node build options. I'm thinking my best bet is to wait for availability of the $15 Modtronics SX1276 which should ship sometime in March. This gives me the benefit of using the SX1276 and higher output power. Adding a $5 Antenna and $35 Raspberry Pi brings solution cost to around $55. .Software will be based on the repository at mayeranalytics/pySX127x.
Thanks for reading. Any comments or suggestions are much appreciated!