Suggest me which board is best to use LORA with Riot

Development Boards
1

Hi everyone!

I have decided to adopt Lora for a marine station and I am asking which board do you suggest me to buy in order to use Lora.

Is it easily supported by Riot OS. Also with some exmaple application …

Thank You .Bye

2

Seems like we have two commercially available options defined as board in RIOT. The Feather M0 Lora and the WiFi LoRa 32. When you a boards with low energy consumption the Feather Lora is probably the better board.

Said that, it is quite pricey. If you don’t want to spend that money, there is always the option to use a base board with a lora module. It’s not terrible complicated to connect a SX1261x module to a board. The lora boards cost ~4 Euro. So, they are quite cheap. It’s also not very complicated to write the board definition for your custom board. You basically just copy the board definition of the base board you use and add this to board.h. Of course, you change it accordingly to your pin configuration. And, of course, you also learn more about RIOT :slight_smile:

Is it easily supported by Riot OS. Also with some exmaple application …

We have some examples for the thing network. . Said that, if there isn’t a thing gateway nearby, you need to setup one yourself or buy a ready to use one. The ready to use ones are quite pricey, since they have multiple lora ICs in order to listen on multiple frequencies at ones. If you just want to have a point to point connection, there is also the option to get some UART module from ebyte. They are quite simple to use and don’t require much configuration. You can just setup one as receiver and one as sender. Depends on your use-case. The thing network is nicer though, since there are tons of libraries for the network. You can subscribe to a stream of events and plot it on a nice web dashboard etc.

3

In addition to those mentionned above, you also have the following boards which support LoRa w/ RIOT:

  • samr34-xpro
  • bastwan
  • nz32-sc151
  • b-l072z-lrwan1
  • i-nucleo-lrwan1
  • lsn50
  • lobaro-lorabox
  • im880b

Some of them required an extra module (as daughter board) but most of them have a built-in radio already.

4
  • b-l072z-lrwan1 should be the easiest to start with and later be integrated into a product, as of now.
5
  • Low stock of b-l072z-lrwan, as well for every stm32 boards.
6

I’m a bit late here, but give it a try anyway.

IMO the hardware makes a HUGE difference regarding Long Range. Sometimes cheap hardware with cheap antennas can barely get > 800m!

Given that, +1 to the proposed options so far.

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