IoT with LoRa

LoRa is an exciting and growing technology that provides low power wireless connectivity over great distances. In addition, when you are in range of a LoRaWAN 'gateway' you can access IoT.

Unfortunately LoRaWAN coverage is not comprehensive and there is no guarantee that there is a gateway in range of your workspace.

Yet, if you do not have access to a gateway you can still send data from a LoRa edge device to the Internet of Things (IoT). This project will show you how to use a micro:bit + XinaBox kit to set up a Wi-Fi 'gateway', with LoRa radio, which connects to the AllThingsTalk Maker platform.

For first-time XinaBox customers, we've assembled the XK71 kit for this project.

BONUS: LoRa 'peer-to-peer' provides a mechanism by which you can communicate between 2 completely different SBCs. In this project you will see how to communicate via LoRa using a BBC micro:bit and an XinaBox CS11 core. You could use any SBC that connects to XinaBox - RPi included, as long as you use our pxt (MakeCode) library to code it (xinabox/pxt-RLxx).

This means that ANY SBCs with XinaBox LoRa radios connected can communicate with each other.

In this project we will:

Build a LoRa receiver, using a micro:bit and XinaBox hardware.
Use this LoRa receiver as a Wi-Fi based IoT 'gateway'.
Connect to the AllThingsTalk Maker Cloud platform.
Show you how to communicate between 2 different microprocessors using LoRa peer-to-peer.

All the details you need to create your own Wi-Fi based LoRa 'gateway' and communicate between 2 different SBCs is available in this PDF. Its MUCH quicker and easier than you think... the entire code base is shown below:

Code for the BBC micro:bit: