- Your gateway is programmable. You can program it to do anything you want, including directly pushing to your backend. You do not need to use TheThingsNetwork at all. I started with LoRa even without using LoRaWAN, just making MOTEs talk to eachother directly. However, then you need to deploy your own gateways everywhere you want to use your devices, and nobody else can use your gateway. The value of TheThingsNetwork is the standardization of the infrastructure so that everyone may share and our devices can freely roam.
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mosquittois an MQTT broker, available in themoquittodebian package. Croft (the TTN demo backend) already runs a broker. What you need is an MQTT client. You can get client libraries for various programming languages, or you can use the command-line programmosquitto_subavailable from themosquitto_clientsdebian package.