Getting Started in LoRaWAN - Hands-On
The Internet of Things, with its billions of nodes, will often require a significant number of these nodes to be able to operate over battery power, perhaps for years between changes. The quest for a low-power technology to enable this has produced a number of interesting solutions. In our lead-off class we will look at these solutions and how LoRa fits in with these.
In our second class, we will look in detail at the way that LoRa and LoRaWAN operate and what we will need for a robust LoRaWAN system, including the server network.
In our third class, we will go through the process of designing a simple system using LoRaWAN, including a survey of what solutions are available to us. We will then design a simple node using our example board from STMicro.
One of the challenges of implementing LoRaWAN is that there may not be the existing WAN structure available in either the developer's area or in the customer's vicinity. In our penultimate class, we will look at some solutions available to us for both off-the-shelf as well as build-your-own servers.
Now that we have our low-power nodes and a test server, in our final class we will test our LoRaWAN solution and look at ways we can optimize our battery life and other parameters that we can improve in our solution.
Charles J. Lord, PE is an embedded systems consultant and trainer with over 40 years' experience in system design and development in medical, military, and industrial applications. For the last twelve years, he has specialized in the integration of communication protocols into clients' products, including USB, Ethernet, and low-power wireless including ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, LoRa, and Thread. He has taught classes in these protocols for Freescale, Renesas, various universities and conferences including ESC and Arm TechCon. He has been a design partner with Freescale/NXP, Microchip, and Renesas. He also teaches webinars for various clients on IoT and embedded systems topics. He earned his BS in electrical engineering from N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C. and provides training and consulting services through his company, Blue Ridge Advanced Design, in Asheville, N.C. He is a licensed professional engineer in NC and a senior member of the IEEE. In his volunteer work at the IEEE, he has served at many levels from local to regional to board committees. He is currently the chair of the IEEE Western NC Section, NC Council and was general chair of IEEE SoutheastCon 1995 and 2017