It’s a night mare.
DHCP client list
Ping
Web
I seriously asked myself. What do I do here? It was my second attempt to implement OS 4.2 on RPi (3 and 4). The second, and I think it’s the last attempt.
I feel very tired of fighting with this version. I want to ask one question. Is anybody who successfully finished the CS Lorawan project working longer than a few hours (dev nonce!)? Is it worth to spend time and money with Chirpstack?
I’ve been using Chirpstack for various projects and I have also been studying its code, so I know that the LoRa Network Server portion itself is awesome. But I’m not using the Chirpstack Gateway OS, so I cannot speak for what’s wrong or to be expected for your case.
If you have a screen and keyboard connected, you could run ip addr show, to get the link and IP address status of the RPi. If it failed to connect or already got another IP address, then the information shown in your router would not be useful.
For commercial gateways, I am using KerOS that comes with Kerlink gateways, which formed a complete LoRa gateway solution from Kerlink. KerOS can have either a UDP packet forwarder or BasicStation module installed.
For my IoT Starter kit sets (RPi model 2B + SX1301 HAT), I went with my own OS image because I am long out of support and my kits are really very old. But I know that they once had images from their manufacturers, which were Semtech and RisingHF.
For today’s purposes, I used the stock Raspbian with my own compiled copy of the Semtech UDP Packet Forwarder/Semtech BasicStation from Semtech’s Github.
RAKWireless seemed to have provided images that fit hardware they provided, but I have no idea how well those work. I wrote in another thread that I used the RAK5146 with an industrial PC, so I built my own software solution again and took the transmission power calibration tables from RAK’s configuration files.
Just a moment after I sent this message, in the desperation act, I put the second one, SD, with version 4.2.0. And big surprise, my keyboard blinked (I have a gamer keyboard attached to the RPi). Wow, I entered the address of the chirpstack router, and the login page appeared on the web page. I didn’t know why it didn’t work; I don’t know why it started to work.
But I ordered a second one, the RAP5146 device. I postpone my test till I will have this device on my desk.
It seems your SD card is nearly dead.
Sometimes ok sometimes not.
SD card is the weakest point of a RPi.
Get a decent SD card.
Yes, I know. So, my latest installations, the Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS, have an SDD disk attached via USB. I asked about the same functionality for CS, but I don’t see any views to realize that idea.
I’m afraid of unstable version 4.2 regarding starting the system from the SD disk. Many times, I couldn’t run the poweroff command, and I had to switch off the power manually. I lost one of my RPis 4 this way.
Not shutting down the RPi properly probably won’t damage the hardware, but the filesystem (and thus the OS) may get corrupted. There are good SD cards, and some not really good ones. The RPi boots most naturally from the SD card, unfortunately.
According to the documentation for the Chirpstack gateway OS, it is based on OpenWRT instead of the Raspbian image. So that may explain some differences in behaviour.
It is likely possible to use Raspbian to run a gateway, but I suppose you’re looking for a complete solution since you’ve been exploring this image?
If you prefer Raspbian, would you be open to putting together a working system by copying/installing the software into Raspbian?
Since you mentioned buying a new RAK5146: did you consider getting a completed gateway instead of putting one together on your own?
There are various ways to use Chirpstack. What I usually do, looks like this:
Gateway ---> [GWB + LNS]
Whereby the gateway communicates with the Gateway Bridge (GWB) using GWMP, BasicStation or perhaps Chirpstack’s MQTT protocol. But I usually go with the Semtech software, to avoid coupling the gateway to only Chirpstack. The components within the square brackets represent Chirpstack that is running on a server (either on a cloud or on a LAN).
There are also people who run the Gateway Bridge on the gateway, with concentratord. I believe that looks like this:
(concentratord + GWB) ---MQTT--> [LNS]
By the way, RAKWireless has this image: https://downloads.rakwireless.com/#LoRa/RAK5146/Firmware/
I don’t know why it’s not linked to from the RAK5146 page and I have never used it, but it may possibly contain the necessary software to turn the RPi + RAK5146 into a LoRa gateway.
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