IoT (Internet of Things) is a has become a reality. Its adoption is increasing at exponential rates in almost all areas. I’m lucky that a friend of mine lent me his “Dragino Lora IoT Kit” to develop a prototype for his startup. The kit comes in this beautiful box.

Getting the Arduino Uno board to work on my Macbook was quite a hassle. I had to download a firmware from a website which I don’t remember for it to work. Yep, I was so desperate that I ignored the security concerns. But finally, my Arduino IDE finally recognized the board. I connected an RFID reader to it but unfortunately it couldn’t read any of my tags or cards. I’m guessing it’s simply a faulty reader. I will get a new one soon.

LoRa is a long distance, low power IoT network. It is similar to SigFox IoT network which has already been deployed in Mauritius. The difference between these 2 is that SigFox sells its network and LoRa sells its chips. Meaning anyone can have his own private LoRa network but has to buy the hardware for SemTech. On the other hand, anyone can manufacture SigFox equipments but they have to connect to SigFox’s official network only.

The Dragino Kit offers a LoRa gateway along with 2 Arduino Uno’s coupled with LoRa Shields. The results:

It’s just a simple hello world app but now is when the fun is going to start. Next I plan to make the LoRa server pair with my custom MQTT server and send logs to my ElasticSearch cluster so I can start analyzing data.

If you have more ideas on how we could use this technology, feel free to have a little chat 😉