I recall a number of LoRa devices being announced: a gateway, a PinePhone backplate and so on. However, there doesn't seem to be any mention of these on Pine64.com.
Are the products still in development? Are they affected by current chip shortages?
LoRa in general is a bit of a mess. It's not Pine64.
Of the two older competitors, LoRa is more friendly to new systems than Sigfox is. But both come with more restrictions than I suspect Pine wants. Plus, there are few open LoRaWAN installations around for people to use in exploratory manners. To make matters even worse, if I recall correctly, they don't actually enforce airtime restrictions.
That will fall back on vendors to pretend to "enforce" them via software and other restrictions. Should the technology ever really take off... And that would cause problems for existing systems that ignore the duty cycle aspects.
Or that's my view from looking into these for monitoring honey bee hives around town (Atlanta, GA, US area) a while ago. The various LTE systems, well, their networks exist. There are cheap plans. But then vendors must kowtow to the networks' certification requirements, otherwise known as payola. All for what's a public resource here in the US.
It's fun, really.
Yes, it is a lot of fun. Have been playing with a TTGO Lora board for the past few weeks.
How does one get his hands on the Pine64 prototype boards?
We are living in the time of pretty open LoRaWAN conditions, if it stays a niche we will have very long range even if at low bandwidth. The frequency bands 433mhz EU or 800mhz NA probably by IARU region are not legal in the other's region without an amateur radio license and following identification rules.
For now a Hetec node is around 20euro last time I checked, there is a cheap ESP32 implementation by Heltec with LoRa, Wifi, and Bluetooth and a OLED display which can be programmed using the Arduino IDE and is suitable for solar powered installation.
Thanks for the updates everyone. I can't wait to get my hands on some
If I understand it correctly, this is basically an internet router, but without any middlemen like an ISP and an internet backbone, or am I missing something?
母語は日本語ですが、英語も喋れます(ry