.NET Core LoRaWAN Client Using a RAK3172 Module

A. NET Core + RAK3172 module based LoRaWAN client. Tested on The Things Network (TTN) and The Things Stack(TTS).

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.NET Core LoRaWAN Client Using a RAK3172 Module

Things used in this project

Hardware components

RAKwireless RAK 3172S Breakout Board

Seeed Studio Grove Base Hat for Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B

Seeed Studio Grove - 4 pin Female Jumper to Grove 4 pin Conversion Cable

RAKwireless RAK Wireless 7258 Indoor Gateway

Software apps and online services

Microsoft Visual Studio 2019

Raspberry Pi Raspbian

The Things Industries The Things Stack

Raspberry Debugger

Microsoft .NET Core

Microsoft .NET Core 5 ARM32 Runtime

Story

A few months ago I ordered a base-station from RAKWireless and added couple of RAK3172 breakout boards for evaluation into the box. These had been sitting on my desk gathering dust so while I had some downtime I started building a test-rig.

I have been working with .NET Core 5 on embedded devices which have performance similar to a Raspberry PI3/4 (SmartAG+SmartCity).I have had problems getting coverage at some deployments so figured LoRaWAN connectivity could be useful. I was looking at some specialised applications usin ARM64ML.NET running on a device with no wifi or cellular connectivity.

The process of installing the.NET Core ARM32/64 runtimes on RaspberryPI devices has been documented in detail by many other authors so I won't cover it here.

The configuration of The Things Network(TTN) Gateways, Applications and Devices has been covered in detail in several other Hackster.IO projects so I won't repeat it here.

I predominately use Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 (rather than Visual Studio Code) so I spent some time exploring tooling to make deployments and debugging easier which I discuss in this Hackster.IO project.

Raspberry PI3 connected to a RAK3172 Breakout board with a Seeed Grove cable

.NET Core powered RAK3172 device connecting in the Visual Studio Debugger Output window

.NET Core powered RAK3172 device connecting to the Things Industries

This project is a summary of a series of posts on my blog where I cover the construction of my RAK3172 library in significantly more detail.

The Github repository includes a sample application which shows how to send and receive messages with the library and the different configuration options supported.

This library is intended as "plumbing" for.NET developers building LoRaWAN connected applications for.NET Core powered devices.

Footnote

The code appears to be pretty robust, I need to soak test it for a week or two, then test in areas of low coverage to see how that impacts performance and power consumption.

The class B+C support also needs some more testing which I will do in the next couple of weeks.

Based on this library I'm going to go back and revisit my Seeed LoRaE5 and RAKWireless RAK811 on TinyCLR and nanoFramework libraries to "simplicate" them.