Where are the LoRaWAN devices?

[qeek]

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?

[biketool]

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?

I am working on some of the tech, specifically adding hardware POCSAG pager decoding hardware using an output from the LoRa readi receiver.
If you seed the areas you live and work with a few cheap Heltec nodes running a LoRaWAN it is even possible to add solar powered repeater nodes you can even have low speed data/messaging while your commercial wireless modem is physically powered down by using the kill switches in a very large area.
I have no information about logistics though.

[krisradio]

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?

There is good progress being made on implementing LoRa with the Pine DIO.

There is also schematic for the backpack and, just below that, for a USB LoRa adapter.

I think Pine is steadily moving forward on these projects, its just that their PR dept (and by extension the news cycle) has not caught up yet. Presumably because these projects are still pretty far from market - just because there is a schematic and a working prototype or two does not mean the tooling and production lines are being brought together yet.

[jasonriedy]

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.

[qeek]

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?

[biketool]

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.

[RTP]

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?

Pinedio is still active and progressing.

  Best place (currently) to keep up with current discussion/state of the Pinedio project work is to visit the often updated 'Lora' marked chat in Pine64 chat channels (ex: discord)

  Hardware dev progress can be viewed at the Pinedio Wiki: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinedio

  This week Lup Yuen Lee created some great writeups with screenshots showing one of the options for setting the gateway here: https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/gateway

Cheers 

[qeek]

Thanks for the updates everyone. I can't wait to get my hands on some

[ryo]

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?

[TRS-80]

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?

Well I guess they could be used that way, in a closed network maybe? But I think the point of stuff like TheThingsNetwork is to to connect the (local) RF (LoraWAN) devices to the broader Internet via gateways, such that they can communicate over longer distances.