Using Chirpstack on Helium

Setup and configuration
1

How would I add the helium network to an existing standard Chirpstack v4 LoraWAN network? I’m seeing that my chirpstack instance would need to see the helium network as a gateway somehow and there must be “billing” issues with node traffic.

Maybe it’s unrealistic to contemplate this?

Here is an older post on setting up Chirpstack for Helium but I’d like to use one Chirpstack instance to handle both my local (not Helium) LoRaWAN nodes and far away nodes (with Helium).

2

Helium has its own LoRaWAN network server.

So you dont need to integrate Helium into ChirpStack.

If you really need, Helium has MQTT to integrate with.

3

Helium console (LNS) is depreciated. They will migrate (somewhere in the future) to their new Open LNS architecture where Chirpstack comes in.

1 Like
4

Helium keeps changing the architecture.
Interesting to know. Thanks a lot.

5

Ya… That’s kind of where I’m at. I use (LNS) Console today for remote nodes and I use my instance of chirpstack for nodes that are in range. I bring them all to influx in various ways (chirpstack: application, Console: MQTT ) and a few that use influx line protocol. It actually all works well but helium is moving to chirpstack… as mentioned … So I’m thinking to work toward integrating my local, remotely hosted, instance of chirpstack with whatever Helium does rather than end up with two or more instances. I would be great to find some other users who appreciate the “opportunity” here.

6

the easiest method is to probably use an existing console as a private tenant on someone like ours perhaps depending on how many devices you plan on running. the licensing caveats on the one you linked put me off using it personally. so i ended up writing a python connector to handle the device joins with helium routes myself on a vanilla chirpstack instance. feel free to dm me

7

I’m currently doing some testing with Helium (work in progress), I believe there are two options:

  • If you have a LoRa Alliance NetID, you can setup a Helium to ChirpStack roaming based on the NetID that you own.
  • If you don’t have a NetID, then you can buy a block of Helium DevAddrs that will be routed to your ChirpStack instance.

You will be charged for requesting the OUI + if you don’t own a NetID the DevAddr range + for the data that is being forwarded to you. The data that you will receive is the same as the Semtech UDP Packet Forwarder protocol.

This is explained here:

Once I have a better understanding about how this works, I am also planning to add some documentation to the ChirpStack website :slight_smile:

3 Likes