Unboxing: RAK Wireless RAK2245 LoRa Starter kit

RAK2245 Gateway HAT

RAK2245 is a new product from RAK Wireless. Comparing it to the RAK831, it has a new heat sink design that produces better thermals, improved interference resistance and all of it can produce a lot better and stable reception. I will not go into deeper about the difference of the two boards. More information can be found here.

Connecting It to the The Things Network or LoraServer

I will not be doing an in depth tutorial on how to connect your gateway to The Things Network (TTN) or LoraServer.io. Since there have been a lot of great tutorials out there. These are some tutorials that I found to be helpful and informative:

1. https://www.hackster.io/fomi-T/simplest-lora-starter-kit-w-rak2245-rpi-ttn-loraserver-0ad993

2. https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/labs/story/rak831-lora-gateway-from-package-to-online

3. https://github.com/RAKWireless/RAK2245-RAK831-LoRaGateway-RPi-Raspbian-OS

4. MobileFish LoraWan Tutorial (RAK831)

Assembling the Enclosure

There are two types of aluminum enclosure available in their online shop which is for the Older RAK831 and for the New RAK2245. According to their website, the aluminum enclosure is a black sandblasting anodized aluminum body.

1st: Assembling the enclosure is easy. First take out your Raspberry Pi and remove the brass nuts from the hat.

2nd: Unscrew the acrylic bottom plate of the raspberry pi and you have to make sure that you keep those white screws, we will be needing it later on.

3rd: Carefully remove the M3 Standoffs and set it aside, then remove the RAK2245 Hat from the Raspberry Pi.

4th: Unfortunately in the Enclosure Kit, it doesn't come with some Standoffs so we will be using the previous M3 Screws to screw the raspberry pi to the bottom plate of the enclosure.

5th: Stack the RAK2245 Hat on top of the raspberry pi and screw it using the White Plastic Screws that we got from the Acrylic Base of the Raspberry Pi

6th: In this step, I advise that you should connect the antenna and the GPS Antenna as it is almost impossible to connect it later because of the tight space. At first I thought the kit comes with uFL to SMA connector but it doesn't, instead it comes with an ordinary radio and gps antenna. But you can order for a connector online and connect a much larger antenna. Waiting for mine to come

7th: Screw the bottom plate to the body as well as the top plate.

8th: All we need to do is put the sticker and rubber cover for some holes for protection

9th: That is it! Boom! We are done! I hope there is a specific enclosure for the RAK2245 without the LTE Hat and in that way the upper part of the aluminum enclosure will have some contact to the heatsink of the RAK2245.