Stage 3: Building Your Gateway

Find the Gateway’s IP Address

You will need to know the IP address of the Raspberry Pi to access your ChirpStack gateway. You have several options for finding the IP address of your Raspberry Pi.

If you have a network administrator, ask them for assistance in locating the IP address. You may need to reboot the Raspberry Pi so the administrator can see the IP address appear.

If you have an Android or iOS device with access to your Wi-Fi network:

  1. Download and install the free Fing app.

  2. Make sure your Android or iOS device is connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the Raspberry Pi.

  3. Perform a Network Scan using the Fing app.

  4. Scroll down to locate the device with the name starting with raspberrypi…. The IP address is just below the name.

  5. Write down the IP address. In upcoming steps, we refer to this as the RASPBERRY_PI_IP_ADDRESS.

  6. If your device is not listed, click Refresh.

If you are using macOS or Windows 10:

  1. Download and install the free Fing Desktop.

  2. Make sure your macOS or Windows 10 device is connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the Raspberry Pi.

  3. Use the Fing desktop app to perform a Network Scan.

    Note

    The default view does not show IP addresses. Select the Standard view.

  4. Locate the device with the name that starts with raspberrypi…, clicking through the pagination if necessary. The IP address is in the IP column.

  5. Write down the IP address. In upcoming steps, we refer to this as the RASPBERRY_PI_IP_ADDRESS.

  6. If your device is not listed, click Refresh to update the list.

If you have access to your router, the Administration panel may show the IP addresses of items on your network. You may need to turn the Raspberry Pi off and then back on for the IP address to appear.

If you are using Linux and do not have access to Android or iOS, or prefer not to install Fing, you can use the open source tool Angry IP Scanner, available for macOS, Windows, or Linux:

  1. Install Java 8 or OpenJDK as instructed on the download page.

  2. Download and install the app.

  3. Click Start.

  4. Locate the item with the Hostname that starts with raspberrypi….

  5. The IP address is in the IP column.

  6. Write down the IP address.

If you are familiar with the command-line tool nmap, you can also use that to obtain the IP address of your Raspberry Pi.