Hacker News Reader

Comment by xd1936 | Hacker News Reader

xd1936

LoRa is awesome technology, if you haven't yet played with it. Here in West Michigan, our city's Board of Public Works runs the local power station, which in turn powers snowmelt heated sidewalks in our downtown area. The employees are testing homegrown bricks in the sidewalk with little temperature sensors and LoRa radios that can run for months without needing a recharge, that in turn report their temperatures back to homebase. Super cool.

https://www.hollandsentinel.com/news/20180626/new-smart-bric...

LoRa can be used for all kinds of low-bandwitch medium-range transmission of data. Temperatures, lat-long, you name it.

View on HN

I've played with LoRaWAN and I think that it has one major problem. Limited ack frames. In such case you can not be 100% sure about your data. Symphony link claims that they have every frame acked, and firmware uploads, but I didn't test it. LoRaWAN could work with custom channels (private freq), not limited to 1% of air time.

I'm not that deep involved in LoRa but isn't there a problem with it that by spamming the network you can take down the whole one with a $3 device?

In general LoRa (and LoRaWan) are designed to be very resilient against interference, but targeted jamming seems possible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.02141.pdf

On the other hand, jamming is possible for most radio protocols. I'm pretty sure it's illegal though, even in the license free band.

And LoRaWan in standard mode is inherently unreliable (unconfirmed packages by default). Using it for "passive" logging is fine, using it for critical "active" remote control maybe less so.

This could definitely be an issue, but in my use case I think I'd find the perp pretty quickly and scare him off with my pitchfork :) . It's important to space out the messaging, I don't send more frequently than 1msg/minute, and messages are 8-12 bytes, and most sensors are 1 msg/hour.

Yes you must respect the band duty cycle ! Check your respective country regulation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com