5 ms·

LoRa is awesome technology, if you haven't yet played with it. Here in West Michigan, our city's Board of Public Works runs the local power station, which in tu

by xd1936 8y ago

LoRa is awesome technology, if you haven't yet played with it. Here in West Michigan, our city's Board of Public Works runs the local power station, which in turn powers snowmelt heated sidewalks in our downtown area. The employees are testing homegrown bricks in the sidewalk with little temperature sensors and LoRa radios that can run for months without needing a recharge, that in turn report their temperatures back to homebase. Super cool. https://www.hollandsentinel.com/news/20180626/new-smart-brick-will-aid-in-snowmelt-efficiency https://www.hollandsentinel.com/news/20180626/new-smart-bric... LoRa can be used for all kinds of low-bandwitch medium-range transmission of data. Temperatures, lat-long, you name it.

deleted 8y ago
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tibu 8y ago
I'm not that deep involved in LoRa but isn't there a problem with it that by spamming the network you can take down the whole one with a $3 device?
- dbrgn 8y ago
  In general LoRa (and LoRaWan) are designed to be very resilient against interference, but targeted jamming seems possible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.02141.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.02141.pdf On the other hand, jamming is possible for most radio protocols. I'm pretty sure it's illegal though, even in the license free band. And LoRaWan in standard mode is inherently unreliable (unconfirmed packages by default). Using it for "passive" logging is fine, using it for critical "active" remote control maybe less so.
- tehf0x 8y ago
  This could definitely be an issue, but in my use case I think I'd find the perp pretty quickly and scare him off with my pitchfork :) . It's important to space out the messaging, I don't send more frequently than 1msg/minute, and messages are 8-12 bytes, and most sensors are 1 msg/hour.
  - chli 8y ago
    Yes you must respect the band duty cycle ! Check your respective country regulation.
d21d3q 8y ago
I've played with LoRaWAN and I think that it has one major problem. Limited ack frames. In such case you can not be 100% sure about your data. Symphony link claims that they have every frame acked, and firmware uploads, but I didn't test it. LoRaWAN could work with custom channels (private freq), not limited to 1% of air time.

by xd1936 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tibu 8y ago

I'm not that deep involved in LoRa but isn't there a problem with it that by spamming the network you can take down the whole one with a $3 device?

dbrgn 8y ago
In general LoRa (and LoRaWan) are designed to be very resilient against interference, but targeted jamming seems possible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.02141.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.02141.pdf On the other hand, jamming is possible for most radio protocols. I'm pretty sure it's illegal though, even in the license free band. And LoRaWan in standard mode is inherently unreliable (unconfirmed packages by default). Using it for "passive" logging is fine, using it for critical "active" remote control maybe less so.
tehf0x 8y ago
This could definitely be an issue, but in my use case I think I'd find the perp pretty quickly and scare him off with my pitchfork :) . It's important to space out the messaging, I don't send more frequently than 1msg/minute, and messages are 8-12 bytes, and most sensors are 1 msg/hour.
- chli 8y ago
  Yes you must respect the band duty cycle ! Check your respective country regulation.

d21d3q 8y ago

I've played with LoRaWAN and I think that it has one major problem. Limited ack frames. In such case you can not be 100% sure about your data. Symphony link claims that they have every frame acked, and firmware uploads, but I didn't test it. LoRaWAN could work with custom channels (private freq), not limited to 1% of air time.