Introduction
What You Will Build
By following this lab, you build a LoRaWAN network consisting of:
- An end node with LoRa functionality built using an Arduino board.
- A gateway featuring LoRa using a Raspberry Pi, Pi Supply Gateway HAT, and running the ChirpStack Gateway OS.
- A local or cloud-hosted instance of ChirpStack.
- A local or cloud-hosted instance of ThingsBoard, which displays the sensor value on a simple dashboard.
Figure 1: High Level Architecture of the LoRaWAN network
The example application for this exercise is a moisture sensor. The moisture reading is taken at set intervals by an Arduino-based end node built for LoRa communications and broadcast in a LoRa message.
The end-node message is received by a Raspberry Pi gateway running ChirpStack Gateway OS. The message is then sent to an instance of the ChirpStack Network Server, deployed using Docker Compose, either locally or in the cloud (AWS / Azure).
ChirpStack has a range of integrations that allow you to use third-party systems to process and visualize device data. You will be integrating with ThingsBoard Community Edition in this tutorial. The instance of ThingsBoard will be deployed locally or in the cloud (AWS / Azure). You will then create a dashboard with a simple digital gauge to display the most recently-received moisture reading.