You guys are aware that LoRa is a closed source, patented, and name trademarked protocol right? TMK Semtech is the only company that is licensed to produce the hardware radios. Beyond that it's dog shit slow. IIRC Best I could do was 2kb/s half-duplex using custom headers and bit banging the data line instead of using the SPI interface from under 1000ft distance with proper antennas from the RF team on campus. It was the maximum the radio could handle, if you don't believe me, Semtech published a software tool that tells you exactly what the maximum throughput is as a function of the radio configuration. Its poopy. We have better technology that can operate in the same frequency ranges, why are we stuck on LoRa???
Discussion
I don't get it either. It took me five minutes to decide it isn't worth my time. The concept is, but not a proprietary shit option.
Yeah man I agree on mesh network stuff but LoRa is just garbage for anything more than signalling, which again was it's purpose. Not data transfer.
The biggest thing is the radios are best described as "multiplexed, half duplex". The radio can only be in a single state at any given time, which also has delays. It also needs to be reset to idle state to clear registers after every (tx event i believe). It's just not efficient in my opinion if you actually sit down to write system level code for it, let alone monitoring power draw and delay times which cause missed preambles.
My use case for lora or loraWAN has always been just that:signaling. Probably not going to use it like WiFi.
But there are some fun projects out there. I agree its lame that semtech owns it and it's not open source.
I assume you are aware, but if not, check out the gnu radio companion module for lora, I believe some enterprising rf lovers reverse engineered some of the modulation scheme for tx/rx with an SDR a few years ago.
Isn't there a FOSS alternative floating around? License-free usage and low power draw are the value prop afaict
DASH7 is the name of it
D7A
> Isn't there a FOSS alternative floating around
I don't know of it, but there has to be an alternative hardware option
> License-free
If you are speaking of the frequency band, that's open to any radio protocol that can operate in the frequency so not specific to LoRa it just so happens that they developed the hardware to operate in the 100-1000mhz range so it could be made free depending on the region you live
> low power draw
I personally don't think LoRa devices are power efficient but I had hands on experience with other devices short of SDRs, but I think most developers assume the radio is going to be idle or in receive mode which consumes under 2ma iirc, but on maximum transmit power the Semtech units consumed about 45ma iirc in my testing. It's been about 5 years so I could be off, but we only fit enough battery for 4 hours with most of the radio time spent transmitting.
Why is nobody talking about open source LTE or 5g? There are several actively developed open source 5g stacks. https://open5gs.org/
and https://free5gc.org/ are just a couple of examples.
That's even sexier! I was looking into private cell radios a while back, and while it seemed possible the cost was prohibitive!
With LTE and beyond most of the infrastructure is software (for which there is open source). For $1000 you can buy an eNodeB which is the only piece of backend hardware needed for phones to connect to. On android you can pick the mobile network like you choose WiFi.
Please teach me more XD
The issue I found was there was no readily available (or open) hardware that adapted to standard networking like 802.11. Id want to be able to make a big wifi radio if that makes sense. I wasn't able to find any options like that? The closet things I found required a lease from the mfg.
Maybe it has no hobby community due to thinking that it is owned by the corporate realm. That may be true for SIP (voice/SMS) but beyond that anybody can run it and I don't see why there can't be a robust grass-roots data-only network. I don't know much but maybe will start looking at it more and can start something on nostr.
Until recently I had my own voip network and pbx with desktop/landline phones because I'm a nerd.
because the rockstars think it's coo
there is an open secret kind of employment these days on the internet of people who have a lot of influence being paid to market stuff while pretending they are not marketing it, also
this is a pernicious influence on people, who swallow this bullcrap because they are social climbers and creates a feedback loop of people thinking some commercial bullshit is cool when it's just a bunch of paid shills pretending to not be paid shills
1: Semtech owns it; there are other chip producers with licenses from Semtech
2: the phy has been reverse engineered and opensourced
3: LoRaWAN is open btw
4: everytime it comes up i have communicated using LoRa is not a good idea; it was designed for a different purpose all together (i.e. large sensor networks for which it is great).
I think the reason people keep going for LoRa is because there are a lot of cheap and easy resources available🤷♂️
(Was an IoT consultant, mostly LoRa, for 4,5 years, doing designing and producing sensors all the way to designing and deploying large scale networks)
> Semtech owns it;
I think they only own the hardware design, I think another company holds the patent?
> the phy has been reverse engineered and opensourced
The protocol is patented so I wonder if it infringes and could be sued? I ran into some issues reverse engineering propriety firmware in a past gig.
> everytime it comes up i have communicated using LoRa is not a good idea; it was designed for a different purpose all together
That's the entire point of this note!!!
I would agree, Semtech radios are everywhere, cheap, and easy to talk to, although with the rf95 I ran into some issues where a couple register numbers were swapped but the rf69 docs were correct. I sent them an email but never heard back lol
Semtech acquired the company of the three guys that created the phy, they run the entire thing.
They were hard enough to get a hold off
eventhough we had close ties and direct lines of contact hehe.
This is why I think #reticulum is more interesting than #meshtastic
A physical layer agnostic encryption first networking stack is so much more than what meshtastic aspires to be at its best. Sadly decentralized sms is the first application for both and knowledge isn't there for less knowledgeable users, so those differences are hard to understand.
LoRa is the shiny UX Twitter commercial opposite of packet radio. Check out https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum
you can do more with a $30 UV5R and a $10 home made TNC than LoRa. However, encryption is generally illegal, so it would be clear text, or grid down pirate radio.
So it's legal to transmit, but illegal if you transmit data encrypted?? So you can have your communications as long as we can spy on you??