4 ms·

There seems to be so much excitement around LoRa, but I don’t really get it… What is the use/appeal?

• rcxdude 2y ago
  it's low power and long range, but low bandwidth. For a lot of applications, that's pretty useful.
• ElectRabbit 2y ago
  It's extremely sensitive to weak signals (-146dBm.. for comparision Wifi becomes unreliable below -80dBm and unuseable at -90dBm) and thanks to its chirp character very robust in presence of noise (jammers, alien stations, etc.). You either can parametrize it for speed or for robustness - there are a lot of parameters to fine tune it. Also it's easy to switch even faster modes (that are not LoRa) by just sending a few SPI commands. The documentation of the chips is stellar. There are good software libs around, also Zephyr supports a few of them. Also Semtech is extremely hobbyist friendly. If you want to play around with them: use LoRaWAN and The Things Networks. There are a lot of basestations around - at least in Europe. Getting >30km links with a still a metric ton of SNR left pretty much the standard. Even with lightly obstructed LoS. I've seen experiments with balloons that hat >400km links with plenty to SNR left. Practically: we are using a single LoRaWAN basestation to gather telemetry from a giant industry complex. No problem even if the sensors are placed deep in the basement.
  • xanderlewis 2y ago
    Cool!