This page will give you all the information you need to manage the LoRa concentrator from your software. Using this guide and the Software

integration guide, you will be able to integrate your LoRa forwarder into the gateway.

LoRa concentrator

The gateway uses the Semtech SX1301 concentrator.

Power

The LoRa concentrator is always powered, this mean you don't need to do anything to turn in on.

Reset

The concentrator is reset at during the operating system boot, by the OpenRC service lora-concentrator enabled in the sysinit runlevel.

However, it is recommended to always reset the concentrator as you start to communicate with it. This can be done in multiple ways :

  • Using the concentrator reset script
  • Using the lora-concentrator service
  • Accessing GPIO

Using the concentrator reset script

This method is available on all gateways and abstract the hardware details behind the reset. It is the recommended way to reset it from your software.

Reset the LoRa concentrator with the dedicated script

sudo /usr/sbin/lora-concentrator-reset
BASH

Using the lora-concentrator service

This method is available on all gateways and abstract the hardware details behind the reset.

To reset the concentrator, run:

Reset the LoRa concentrator with the OpenRC service

sudo rc-service lora-concentrator reset
BASH 
lora-concentrator| * Resetting the LoRa concentrator ...

Accessing GPIO

If needed, you can reset the concentrator using the GPIO. You need to set level 1 to GPIO 1 of chip 0 for 100000 cycles.

This can be done with the gpioset CLI utilities or using the libgpiod library.

Reset the concentrator with gpioset

sudo gpioset --mode=time --usec=100000 gpiochip0 1=1
sudo gpioset gpiochip0 1=0
BASH

Communication

Communication with the concentrator is done by SPI. The bus is available on /dev/spidev0.0.