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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

There used to be a good wikipedia article about LoraWan, which is better than this (for IoT) in just about every way, but it has been replaced with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRaWAN

LoraWan consumes power at a similar rate that BLE does, except it has a 20km range. You're talking about months (or even years, depending on your interval) of usefulness out of a CR2032 coincell battery.

Sidenote: the removal of the wikipedia page on this irks me more than it probably should. They're claiming a copyright problem because some of the text of the page was taken from the Lora Alliance's official website.

https://www.lora-alliance.org/What-Is-LoRa/Technology

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> They're claiming a copyright problem because some of the text of the page was taken from the Lora Alliance's official website.

Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content.

>Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content.

Do you mean by wikipedia's definition of stolen? Because some things, like for instance: the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability.

Like I said, this irked me more than it probably should. I totally get sometimes stuff will get caught in the margins.

Wikipedia's mission is NOT about usability, but to provide an encyclopedia that can be used, edited, forked, reproduced EVERYWHERE without anyone having to fear lawyer attacks.

It's not a "free as in free beer" encyclopedia, it's a "free as in truly free" encyclopedia.

(Yes I know that this is only valid for the text content, images (e.g. logos) and screenshots are not free but used under different legal regimes in different countries)

> Wikipedia's mission is NOT about usability, but to provide an encyclopedia that can be used, edited, forked, reproduced EVERYWHERE without anyone having to fear lawyer attacks.

To that, I say [citation needed]. Where in their mission statement do they state this particular stance on lawyer attacks?

With all the fundraising activity, it should be about usability and put some aside for those instances.

> the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability

that's not how copyright law works. you may argue that it should work that way, but it does not work that way unless you petition Congress to modify it

Yeah, but it's a relatively safe bet that an organization would rather be represented by their own carefully-reviewed, professionally-crafted verbiage than one hastily thrown together by a volunteer editor, and thus would not pursue action against the publisher.

I'm not saying that Wikipedia should use content without the appropriate licensure, but in practice, copyright is violated as a matter of routine to provide some fairly basic services. Copyright law should be amended to prevent liability for conventional uses.

Multiply that "relatively safe bet" times the millions of times this would happen if Wikipedia relaxed their stance.

Like I said, I don't think it'd be a good idea for Wikipedia to start copying and pasting from random websites without the appropriate clearances. I do think it'd be a good idea to revise the law so that normal uses are not illegal anymore.

Still wouldn't change much because, thanks god, the US law is not global ^^

The U.S. has trade negotiations which tend to include mutual or compatible copyright law with most of the countries in the world.

Yes, they are among the biggest copyright aggressors of the world. Just like L Lessig, I care about common sense copyright policy, which forces me to care about reforming the U.S. campaign finance system so that congress can represent the people again.

Then the organization should have provided the text under an appropriate free license if they wanted it to be broadly reused. (Which is actually a good idea and more organizations should probably do for boilerplate they'd like others to cut and paste.)

Organizations would put the boiler plate under a "You can copy and paste, but no modifications, please." licence. Wikipedia would need special support (machine enforced or not) for blocks of text that can only be used or removed in their entirety, but not changed.

Come to think of it, that's not too different from how quotations work. So they might be able to deal with them.

I wonder how much text from a public (albeit copyrighted) source can be quoted under fair use, with attribution and all.

Here's what an unofficial essay on Wikipedia says and I think it sums it up sensibly:

> The copied material should not comprise a substantial portion of the work being quoted, and a longer quotation should not be used where a shorter quotation would express the same information. What constitutes a substantial portion depends on many factors, such as the length of the original work and how central the quoted text is to that work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Quotations#Copyright...

Wow, it claims 2-5km urban and up to 45km rural!

Important question though, is there an affordable module available (ideally also easy to use)? Sniffing around, all I can find is modules costing $45 or more, which kind of kills my enthusiasm for using it in personal projects.

Have a look for RFM98W (434Mhz) or RFM95W (868MHz) on aliexpress/ebay, they're around $14 there.

I know in the UK high altitude balloon community they've used them in flights - http://www.daveakerman.com/?p=1850

Although FSK works just as well in the case of balloons.

Ebay has them for less then $10, + $2 shipping (RFM98W (434Mhz) or RFM95W (868MHz))

LoraWan is super interesting for IOT but as far as I understand it acts more like a traditional radio transmitter? Great for collecting data from lots of discrete sensors but less for bi-directional data transfer

It's bidirectional, that's the whole point. If it was unidirectional it would be no better than standard radio.

I think there's also a bi-directional mode for it.

Isn't one for LoRaWAN specifically, but there are other options like Weightless-W (which doesn't have any hardware released for it yet).

The FAQ says bi-directional:

http://www.semtech.com/wireless-rf/lora/LoRa-FAQs.pdf

LoRa has long range but throughputs is extremely low. It is useful for some applications but not for all.

For most sensors throughput is not the problem -- it's distance, and power consumption.

Except that I can't buy it, it doesn't seem to have a stack, and doesn't have any open implementations to examine.

But, other than that, LoraWan is better.

Uh, yeah. Come back when LoraWan is shipping something other than vapor.

>Except that I can't buy it

Microchip sells radios that do LoRa: http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/technology/person...

They're available on mouser for ~$17: http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip/RN2483-I-RM095...

>it doesn't seem to have a stack, and doesn't have any open implementations to examine.

Here's the source code for a development board with LoRa: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/LoRaMotePack...

So Sematech and Tata's LoraWan plan in India is vaporware? They claimed successful tests, and said their network is open to testing end-to-end by IoT developers.

This is a serious question, I just moved most of my stock portfolio into Sematech after that news. If Sematech's LoraWan is real, this is the best pureplay futurist stock I've seen since Tobii.

UWB was a wonderful technology and claimed successful tests and was open to developers. So was WiMAX (which actually did work). Where are they now?

Almost all the TI low-power RF stuff is real. Anything LoraWAN claims could have been done with these kinds of TI chips: http://www.ti.com/product/cc1125

So, why hasn't it? Mostly because these frequencies need big external antennas. TI has a very nice whitepaper about trying to create integrated PCB antennas for these lower frequencies and how much power you lose (answer--a whole lot). I don't think people are going to be very happy strapping a 6 inch whip antenna onto their tiny LED light.

And, these TI chips actually can run off a coin cell. Unlike the loraWAN stuff which flags Tx power consumption as up to 100mA. Coin cells are still ruled out.

That's not an improvement over, well, anything.

And, I note that Microchip is claiming to be shipping dev kits sometime this quarter. This is Microchip. I won't hold my breath, and I still mark this as vapor.

>I note that Microchip is claiming to be shipping dev kits sometime this quarter. I won't hold my breath, and I still mark this as vapor.

As of a few minutes ago seven in stock at mouser: http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/DM1...

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