ha_ru

Yes, in fact we actually re-transmit the absolute minimum information (device join/sensor values) to ensure that the LoRaWAN link does not saturate. Data compression helps too and a user can also disable re-transmission of some meta-data, like link quality/battery level.

Your points are valid. Especially the ones on educating an interested user about what the project is good for and how to get started. Thank you for the feedback!

Thanks! Your question is an interesting one: Forwarding TCP over LoRaWAN seems at first impossible due to large packet sizes (from LoRa perspective!). It turns out there have been some efforts to apply dictionary based compression methods to carry different protocols over LoRaWAN. You might want to check out RFC 8376 for details.

We actually thought about a pure microcontroller solution, but stuffing a zigbee coordinator, a mqtt parser and a lorawan stack into an uC seemed a bit overwhelming. It is technically possible with beefier SoCs, but as most ingredients we needed were well available for a PI, we went this route while building the first prototype.

Hi! This project (LoRaBridge) was born few years ago as I was trying to figure out how to get data from the cheap Zigbee sensors in my cellar. In my case, the cellar is not immediately below the main living space, so the Zigbee range even with some repeater nodes was just not enough. One day, out of curiosity, I bought two LoRa modems, mounted one of them in the cellar and the second one in the 2nd floor of the house. I was blown away by the fact that I got a stable connection through so much concrete(!). That was pretty much the light bulb moment for how my solution would look like.

Fast forward 2-3 years, after a (funded!) open source project, there is now a way to mount Zigbee sensors in remote locations. Essentially the solution is a wireless bride, which works like this:

- A remote Raspberry PI unit collects&compresses zigbee data and transmits it over LoRaWAN

- LoRaWAN gateway/servers forward the data towards second PI, which decompresses the data ,takes care of the device management and sends the data further to, e.g., home assistant.

And as a bonus: The device joining process is as easy as it is with zigbee2mqtt ;)