#the things network

[rakwireless]

LoRa/LoRaWAN tutorial 28: LoRaWAN Gateway

In this tutorial mobilefishcom will explain what the #RAK831 Pilot Gateway is, how to configure it and how you can register this gateway with The Things Network

[smartsheffield]

Notes from Meetup #9: The Things Network Takeover (Part 2)

Here are the rest of the talks from the March 2018 event...

Dave Mee from MadLab, The Things Network Manchester and Things North

Dave provides the history of Things Network Manchester, and its origins in civic engagement projects MadLab undertook with Manchester City Council several years ago, in which they discovered how difficult it was to implement smart cities - everything proved hard to do, from building and maintaining the technology available at the time to gaining the right permissions to site sensors and network gateways.

This led them to visit the Things Network in Amsterdam to investigate its potential, and discovered how far advanced they were, how many commercial concerns they had addressed, and the potential of the technology stack to be open and build a community around it.

They took this knowledge back to Manchester and set about bootstrapping a network, starting with the infrastructure (establishing the first gateway at Julien’s house in Chorlton).

They then began engaging with people and city organisations to explain what the technology is capable of and build capacity to use it. The first project to emerge from this was the IoT Smoke Detector in conjunction with the Fire Service, which also provided access to the service’s communications towers as sites for new TTN gateways.

The also established a monthly meetup to build the community, extend the message and generate new collaborations, and extended their advocacy around the country, including at the Wuthering Bytes conference in Hebden Bridge in 2017.

Inspired by the work Ben Ward has done with the Oxford Flood Network, and the switch from ZigBee / WiFi backhaul to a Things Network solution, they got involved with Andrew Back in Calderdale and the effort to extend the network across the whole of the UK.

And more recently, they have been working with an industrial partner to monitor noise pollution, and this is another example of a process they have observed where the initial network is established for commercial purposes, as it is a great cable replacement, but there is so much overcapacity on the network it is then very easy to share it with communities and other stakeholders for additional applications and value.

Over the last couple of years, Things Manchester has seen networks begin to proliferate across the North of england, so much so that it is nearly feasible to move freely around the country without ever leaving coverage. This has led them to initiative the Things North initiative to bring these networks together to collaborate and to proactively connect them together.

Visit the Things North website.

Deepayan Bhowmik from Sheffield Hallam University on IoT Sheffield and Things Connected

Deepayan presented Hallam University’s collaboration with the Digital Catapult to set up one of their Things Connected gateways, which is another LoRa implementation but currently incompatible with the Things Network.

The University intends to leverage this network to provide a means for businesses, students and researchers to experiment with new LPWAN applications, using the resources in the computer science department (Deepayan himself specialises in machine vision, signal processing and related cyber security). This includes work on understanding the capabilities of the technology, and potential attacks and exploits.

The hope is that this effort will develop more people who understand and can build applications, who can then take their skills and experience to other networks, including TTN, and that this network provides another option for people looking to experiment with LPWAN technology.

There are also funding pots available via Innovate UK for projects using the network.

Perry Ismangil from Teluu and The Things Network Sheffield

Perry is a software engineer and co-founder of Teluu, who provide an open source software stack for phone call management. He attended the “Build and Deploy” workshop at Wuthering Bytes in 2017, and that was his first exposure to LPWAN technology. However, when he returned to Sheffield he wasn’t able to connect the device he had built to the network as there were no gateways in Sheffield at that time! So he joined the Things Network kickstarter and was one of the lucky recipients of a working gateway in the early batches. He admits the range isn’t great, as it’s sat behind a window in his house at street level, but it provides connectivity for his purposes and has been very useful for learning about the technology, especially with others in the Sheffield Things Network.

In order to really take things forward though, there needs to be more capacity building and collaboration, and he is looking forward to the series of Smart City Hackathons that are being put together in conjunction with Sheffield Hackspace, starting in April.

Visit the Things Network Sheffield community page.

George Taylor from Caudata and The Things Network Sheffield

Caudata use wireless to bring connectivity to places where cables won’t work. They run their own ISP in Sheffield and built point-to-point networks around the country.

George is particularly interested in applications of LoRaWAN in natural habitats, in our national parks and wild spaces. For instance there are just three breeding pairs of Hen Harriers left in England, but the monitoring technologies that are currently in use to protect them are neither reliable nor energy efficient. Caudata has a division that looks at wildlife monitoring and surveillance, and they are working to trial LoRaWAN deployments using the Things Network to improve current efforts.

He further explained that there is a mission to remove hedgehogs from some of the Hebridean Islands, where they are proliferating due to a dearth of predators, and transport them to the mainland. £3.5 has been allocated for this effort, however the process currently involves rangers regularly checking hedgehog traps, at a total cost of around £1000 per animal repatriation. George is hoping to help address this by developing IoT enabled hedgehog traps that can report their occupancy.

Finally, he has also been involved in an effort to measure the degradation of mountain flower habitats around the flanks of Snowdon, caused by an increase ice climbing in the area. This also involved installing a Things Network gateway to relay sensor data over long distances, and resulted in Caudata picking up packets from Snowden in Castleton in the Derbyshire Peaks, measuring a max range of 140km! (Although George reckons the technology is capable of much longer ranges with specialised equipment and higher line-of-sight deployment).

If anyone is interested in use cases like these, get in touch via the Things Network Sheffield community page.

And that was it - 8 really interesting talks covering a wide range of activity and developments in long range IoT technology across the North of England. We look forward to the next Things Network Takeover! :)

Chris & Matt

[smartsheffield]

Notes from Meetup #9: The Things Network Takeover (Part 1)

In March we had a Things Network Takeover, where we invited people from across the North who are involved with The Things Network (TTN). This is a community-owned and operated Internet of Things network based on LoRa technology, which means it has very long range, low energy consumption and low bandwidth - it’s really a so-called ‘chirp’ network where low power devices out in the environment can take periodic measurements and then communicate them in tiny packets of information (as little as 12 bytes at a time) back via gateways to a central data store.

The Things Network started in a hackspace in Amsterdam in 2015, and now has over 30,000 members around the world. It also makes its own networking hardware, following a successful Kickstarter project. There are TTN communities all over the UK, and there is now a move to bring the northern ones closer together to share knowledge and work on joint projects under the Things North banner.

The Sheffield Things Network is also part of this, and is building a LoRaWAN network across our city, and looking to run some hacks in order to get more people building applications for the network - watch this space!

Anyway, thanks everyone for coming to the event, and especially to Roy Woodhead for pulling it together and getting so many great people gathered in one room - it’s great to see the network come together across the North.

We had eight speakers in total, which I think may be a record - here’s part 1 of the event notes, with the first four speakers. The second set of four are in the next post...

Patrick Fenner - defproc Engineering and The Things Network Liverpool

Patrick runs a digital design and engineering company in Liverpool, called DefProc Engineering, and is the instigator of the Things Network Liverpool.

Patrick tells the story of his involvement with LoRaWAN and the projects that have spring from that involvement, since the first gateway went live in his Liverpool office almost exactly two years ago. He describes the tools and technologies he has used, from designing the gateway for remote monitoring and software updates, to building more, installing them and hosting hackathons to encourage other people to build devices that utilize the network. He explains how quickly things have evolved and the many new gateway options that have materialised since he started.

His ambition going forward is to explain to non-technical people what the point is - what can be done with this technology and how useful it is, using the analogy of bluetooth, which people were similarly unaware of ten years ago.

Defproc have themselves explored several IoT use cases, including a simple humidity monitor, with a dashboard.

Patrick is now looking for other ways of using the technology, and is pleased to be a consortium partner on Liverpool's 5G Test Bed, where they will be deploying a 'push to talk' service to address isolation and loneliness. This involves an elderly person pushing a LoRaWAN-enabled button, and then receiving a phone call from another person who initiated the push to talk system - in other words connecting isolated people in the city without a centrally managed service.

The 5G testbed funding will allow them to set up an additional ten gateways, with 5G backhaul, covering large areas of the city.

Visit the Things Network Liverpool community page.

Julian Tait - Open Data Manchester and The Things Network Manchester

In the first part of his talk, Julian explained what Open Data Manchester do, particularly around the events and workshops they run on data and open infrastructures. The next one will be about land use, using land registry data. They also look at new data practices and standards, and are very interested in the Internet of Things, particularly regarding data ethics and the collection of data through sensors in the environment.

Julian then presented two projects they are currently working on that involve the Things Network:

The Knowable Building Framework looks at how sensor networks can be installed in older buildings in order to provide the benefits of modern sensor installations to those landlords. Beyond the technical challenge, the project looks at how you might create a consensual approach to placing sensors in an environment where you have many different people using the building's spaces.

The building they are using for this project is Federation House, and The Things Network allows the installation of sensors in a non-invasive way, i.e. with no need for cabling. A single gateway was placed in the building, and the sensors were also able to connect to other gateways in the centre of manchester.

Julian explained how they analysed the sensor data in order to identify where savings could be made, and that these savings provided the business case for the project. He then went on to describe how they re-analysed the data to focus on behaviour, and how this can present security or privacy risks. And finally, they looked at how sensors exist in buildings, how visible they are, how they interact with building users (for instance detecting the MAC address on a person's phone), and where the data is stored.

The second project is one that maps pollution and school locations in Greater Manchester, and seeks to help those schools measure and understand the dynamics of pollution that affect them, in the process helping school students learn about sensor networks, analysing data and communicating the knowledge that can be gained from it. The intention is them to work with the GroundWork Trust, to see if air quality can be improved in schools by using planting to mitigate the problem.

Visit the Things Network Manchester community page.

Simon Redding - Spire Digital and The Things Network Chesterfield

Simon explained how he and Simon Nieder are working out of a small community incubator and co-working space called Monkey Works in Chesterfield to develop Things Network projects.

He described Chesterfield’s geography and how they are trying to understand the use case and application areas of the Things Network in a market town.

First of course, they need a network and are building an initial network of 4 gateways which should cover most of the town, with a population of around 100,000 people.

They are working on the following use cases:

Footfall and flow in the town centre.

The cycle network.

Air quality (there is currently only one air quality sensor in the town, and it isn’t where the pollution is).

Flood sensing, in collaboration with the Canal Trust.

Social care and tele-medicine.

Security.

Simon then talks at length about the hardware they have been experimenting with, both gateways and nodes.

Visit the Things Network Chesterfield community page.

Matt Brailsford - Outfield Digital, Barnsley IO and The Things Network Barnsley

Matt runs Outfield Digital, an Umbraco web development agency, with his wife Lucy, as well as the Barnley.io hacker community and The Things Network Barnsley.

Matt only set up TTN Barnsley a few months ago, but already have 3 gateways in the field and can already tell that it will take quite a few more to cover the whole town given it’s topography.

Matt’s advice to other communities is to bring in expertise from other places and people who have already done things, and to build connections with local firms and organisations who can support the effort. The Barnsley Digital Media Centre has played an enormous role in getting the effort off the ground, and through them Matt has been able to open other avenues of support. Grass-roots efforts are hard to get going, but if you can find the right people in positions of authority to support it, then everything becomes much easier.

This includes the local council, who have commissioned one of the gateways to experiment with the potential uses of the technology. TTN has also been a positive force at the Barnsley.io maker space as it has provided a focus and application area for users of the space to learn and get involved in.

Matt’s advice is to be persistent - you don’t need to be a technical expert, often the people who make community efforts work are the ones who keep poking and pushing to make things happen.

Finally, they have a saying: “If you want something to work, buy it. If you want something to lear, build it” - and the approach TTN Barnsley have taken is the latter. Build your own devices in order to really understand how the technology works, and how they can be improved.

Visit the Things Network Barnsley community page.

[eemagineme]

LoRaWAN - Smart City Hackaton

Technology’s going wild and we’re trying to keep up with newest trends which usually leave us in awe and motivate us to grow.

Recently, an event “LoRaWAN - Smart City” was held in Novi Sad, known as the IT center of Serbia. A pretty new technology which seems to have a bright future coming.

WTF is LoRaWAN?

The acronym stands for Long Range Wide Area Network. Simply put, it’s a standard for wireless communication which allows IoT (Internet of Things) devices to communicate over large distances. With this in mind, LoRaWAN enables monitoring different key parameters in cities, for example street lighting, parking, etc. It’s a protocol designed for low-power communications and it allows for things to interact with the internet with no need for 3G or WiFi.

Pretty low battery usage and long range make it perfect for interconnection in computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data.

How does that even work?

LoRaWAN is a basically a two-way based connection between Smart City devices (sensors) and devices/gateways. A network working without the internet, while saving energy and automatically adjusting the signal. While transferring data, it uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) 128 encryption. LoRaWAN uses a number of security keys: NwSKey, AppSKEY and AppKey. All of them have a length of 128 bits.

The Things Network being open source, you only need to buy a gateway. Meaning, you can easily become a part of the network. The goal is to keep the battery lasting as much as you can, thus having Smart City connections active and working.

LoRaWAN in Novi Sad

The association “Makers” from Novi Sad has become an official partner of The Things Network which is building a network for the IoT so that businesses and applications can develop rapidly.

With support of Novi Sad’s Faculty of Technical Sciences we have 7 TTN (The Things Network) gateways active. Students from Department of Electronics created an app that measures signal strentgh in Novi Sad's streets as a part of their student activities. The map with LoRaWAN coverage of all active TTN Gateways can be found here: https://ttnmapper.org/

Everyone interested can become a part of this community; obtaining more TTN gateways will result in better coverage.

The association “Maker” from Novi Sad regularly organizes meetups on this topic, including discussions about other discoveries and creations in robotics & electronics.

And the equipment for this cool revelation?

Another awesome addition - getting equipped with the tech stuff you need isn't that complicated or expensive, either! There's a pretty good and cheap software TT GO ESP 32 LoRa module on GitHub. It comes with an OLED display and you can get it for only $20 online. Check it out.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, follow Maker's meetup page and come and see it yourself. See you there!

[freiburgtech-blog]

The Things Network in Freiburg wird ein Fall für den Gemeinderat: Die Fraktion der Grünen fragt in einem Antrag an das Rathaus nach, ob die Stadt das Vorhaben unterstützen könnte.

Siehe auch: Auf dem Weg zum Volksnetz, Artikel in Der Sonntag

[imadeit-davidjanes]

Seattle will likely be the first city in the U.S. outside of Chicago to participate in the project, which involves deploying a network of sensors around urban environments.

Why restrict to Universities and Research Centres? Is not The Things Network having great success opening up to all comers?

For more information on Array of Things, click the tag.

The Array of Things is expanding outside Chicago. But only to cities that have partnerships with a local university or research institution.

The project, which aims to deploy a fleet of multi-function sensors around the Windy City beginning this year, is also working with city and academic partners to expand to Seattle, as well as Bristol and Newcastle in the United Kingdom. And those are just the beginning — Charlie Catlett, director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data and a driving force behind the project, said he’s working with a total of 18 locations around the world. He’s even partnering with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which wants to test out the sensors’ ability to deliver air quality data as a possible means of improving existing sensors.

[iwiselywise-blog]

The Internet of things - Introducing the newest Kid on the Block..TheThingsNetwork!

The Internet of things – Introducing the newest Kid on the Block..TheThingsNetwork!

“Internet of things” is the new talk of the town these days. So we’ve been hearing a lot of buzz around a future of machines and devices talking to each other, being virtually connected on the net, and becoming SMART! You guys already know, that we have written about Smart Jewelry which keeps you Safe, Smart Belts which measure your waist size. So are you wondering what is the latest trend in…

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[imadeit-davidjanes]

Good explanation of LoRa and The Things Network on IEEE.