IC880 Gateway

Of course it it possible to buy your LoRa gateway, and several models are available on the market ranging from 250 Euro (Thingsnetwork Kickstarter, available August 2016), the Lorank8 available from ideetron.nl for 450 Euro (Ex VAT) and the far more expensive Kerlink gateway.

But it is also quite good possible to build your own. So what do you need:

• RaspberryPI MCU (control computer) running the Gateway software. A Raspberry 2 is good enough for this purpose.
• Small SD card for the Raspberry (16GB or more is recommended)
• A LoRa Gateway card such as the IC880a SPI board of IMST
• A micro USB cable and power Adapter for powering the gateway
• Optional: A WiFi dongle

Total cost for all this is less than 300 Euro inc VAT.

Software

Software for the Raspberry+IC880 combo can be downloaded from Github. The link for the latest software is on the ideetron.nl website

Backplane

The IC880 board has a very unfriendly pin-out which consist ov a very long single pin header on one side where all I/O is done, and a few pins on the other side of the board where power should be connected.

Assembly and boxing

Finding a nice enclosure for your projects is always difficult.