So here we go again... on our own? Today's goal was to get this project set up here, baby steps.

I ran out of project description space, I admit it's a good idea to limit that, ain't nobody gonna read my story. I'm no author and I don't know where that was going anyway :)

What I'm planning on making is often called a single channel LoRaWAN gateway. I've done it before, a long time ago, at least in technology terms. Somewhere around 2017 I had just started a new job and was tasked to fiddle around with LoRa and LoRaWAN. It was all new to me, and I couldn't believe that a transmission often covering multiple kilometers without line of sight aka LOS with minuscule power was possible. One thing led to another and I ended up being the LoRa guy at my company, carrying out LoRa certification testing among other things.

But before I got deep into the LoRa adventures/madness, I made an esp8266 single channel LoRaWAN gateway. I found code on Github, and back then there wasn't much available on this topic (I need to find the source to give credit to). I might have paired the esp8266 with a RFM95 or some other module. It worked and that was that, moved on to full blown LoRaWAN gateways and Bob is actually not my uncles name.

Enter 2021, I get myself a small OpenWRT 4G GL router (GL-X750v2) - nifty apparatus by the way, and eventually try to use it as a LoRaWAN gateway with a USB dongle concentrator. The poor router didn't have enough pixies to power the dongle from the USB port. And that brings me to the current scenario, I have a bunch of LoRa hardware and no gateway.

The idea is to design a board/motherboard with either a mcu and a LoRa tranceiver or the stm32wle5jc. Anyway the radio listens, mcu sleeps, gets interrupted and pushes what it received through USB to the router or whatever capable is hooked up and back and out again if so wishes the network server. MQTT might be mixed into this. A low power LoRaWAN gateway that's the goal.