Open source LoraWAN based pager | Hacker News Reader

Open source LoraWAN based pager

snaponair.com

17 pointsinnovator1168 comments

Interesting idea though a Brief look at the site, hackaday and github does not show the schematic or source code.

Lora is interesting for projects such as this I did a similar data capture project which I moved from WiFi to lora (http://rodyne.com/?p=844) and achieved a massive increase in range and battery life thats why I was keen to peek at the innards..

Would Lora work for game/motion cameras? Moving ~20-100mb per day?

No. LoraWAN is silly slow - that’s the trade off it makes for super low power useage.

And the fair access policies with it restrict you to a max of 38Kb per day of data.

Whoa, glad i asked! I'm seeing these lora/wifi/ble combo boards for ~$20, maybe the move is to use lorawan for signaling and wifi for the data transfer.

Not sure about LoRaWAN as I've never used it but the LoRa chip I use (the SX1276) is just a RF data modem that can work data rates up to at 300Kbps, however at this speed your range will be about the same as WiFi. Using the system as intended and getting any sort of range out of it requires splitting the signal across multiple channels and data rates drop off very rapidly when you do that. There are much better and cheaper solutions if you dont need the range.

What’s the avantage of a pager compared to a smartphone in 2018? I don’t see any. I’d rather just use my phone and email/Slack/Telegram.

Ease of separation between critical and non-critical functions? I.e at night smartphone should have notifications disabled, but pager should not (when on duty). And smartphones are so power hungry that keeping them charged can be a hazzle, especially in a stressful environment where one might want paging.

But yeah, likely going to be specialized situations this fits for.

Recently the advantage seems to be that no one is bulk recording the 868 band.

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