Review on 📡 LoRa GPS HAT 915Mhz for Raspberry Pi 2 Model B/Raspberry Pi 3: Temperature Sensor, DGPS SBAS Support by Joshua Gaines

Well built and functional hardware especially if you have an older Raspberry Pi 2 instead of a new RPi 3. Great Value! It features LoRa and GPS hardware in a working Raspberry Pi hat - no soldering or wiring required. It's definitely not plug-n-play. Don't think you can hook it up to your Raspberry Pi in minutes and have a working LoRa gateway for TTN (Network of Things). Only buy it if you enjoy endless programming and tweaking Linux on your Pi. I also don't recommend this hat if you have real work that needs to be done quickly on this device. Spend your extra cash on a real gateway. I can connect to TTN but am still struggling with poor documentation and outdated libraries for it to actually forward the package to the service. Better yet, see if you can get an old Raspberry Pi 2 - I'm sure it will work fine on this one. If I get one of these and it works well I will update this review. On the downside, it works well enough that if you're hacking for fun, you'll want to keep playing to get some of it. Maybe a super experienced radio programmer can do it quicker than me. The GPS is connected to the Raspberry Pi serial port /dev/ttyS0. In the newer RPi, Bluetooth also uses this port, causing conflicts between the device's GPS and Bluetooth. The instructions on the wiki How to Get GPS to Work on RPi 3 are incomplete and I couldn't get it to work after hours of trying. I think the problem is my (poor) understanding of how gpsd works. I see NMEA GPS suggestions on ttyS0 (including the correct GPS latitude/longitude for my location). I can get gpsmon working if I change the permissions on /dev/ttyS0. But gpsd doesn't work for me. a while. (Note: gpsd and gpsmon are Linux packages that manage the GPS modules). The Single Channel Gateway software example is based on some of IBM's older LoRa libraries that are no longer supported. You need to download the source code and edit the program, there is no already working package you can just download on linux to make this hat work. Have fun. Vicky Draguno for this hat points to a great YouTube video that is outdated and no longer working. If you then follow the link to TTN you will find more buggy code that is not well documented to trick the device into forwarding data packets from your sensors to the TTN service. This is all my experience based on a few days of effort. If I were to start this project again, I would spend a few hundred dollars on a true multi-channel gateway that connects directly to the TTN, and then spend my time getting the sensor clients up and running. exactly how I want it, rather than racking my brains to build a gateway cheaply.