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Once again, the UP Board bridges the gap between makers, innovators and the Internet of Things with the IMST LoRa® gateway expansion.
(https://www.lora-alliance.org)

This time we are working together with IMST (http://www.imst.com/), a German company that specializes in wireless communication. IMST made the porting of their LoRA gateway HAT expansion on the UP board. This provides the chance for all UP users to build their own LoRaWAN™ proof of concept.

LoRaWAN™ is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification intended for wireless, battery operated Things in a regional, national or global network. LoRaWAN target key requirements of Internet of Things such as secure bi-directional communication, mobility and localization services. This standard will provide seamless interoperability among smart Things without the need of complex local installations and gives back the freedom to the user, developer and businesses, enabling the roll out of Internet of Things.

LoRaWAN network architecture is typically laid out in a star-of-stars topology in which gateways is a transparent bridge relaying messages between end-devices and a central network server in the backend. Gateways are connected to the network server via standard IP connections while end-devices use single-hop wireless communication to one or many gateways. All end-point communication is generally bi-directional, but also supports operation such as multicast enabling software upgrade over the air or other mass distribution messages to reduce the on air communication time.

Communication between end-devices and gateways is spread out on different frequency channels and data rates. The selection of the data rate is a trade-off between communication range and message duration. Due to the spread spectrum technology, communications with different data rates do not interfere with each other and create a set of “virtual” channels increasing the capacity of the gateway. LoRaWAN data rates range from 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps. To maximize both battery life of the end-devices and overall network capacity, the LoRaWAN network server is managing the data rate and RF output for each end-device individually by means of an adaptive data rate (ADR) scheme.

With LoRa® technology, UP users can deploy thousands of sensors (end nodes) in the radius of kilometers and connect them to the UP LoRa® solution.

The solution is meant for professionals who have network experience and recommended to be used with a LoRaWAN Server. UP users can find more useful information at the following online forum: http://forum.thethingsnetwork.org/t/open-source-lorawan-network-server/1485

Later in September, UP users will be able to access this solution on the UP Shop. Our UP Team is working on building the UP LoRa Development Kit with LoRa end nodes. This will provide the great opportunity for UP users to build their very own long-range Internet of Things projects!

If you require any further information write to us at
info@up-board.org
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