Research results on reverse engineering of the LoRa protocol and an implementation in GNU Radio. An open source LoRa PHY layer project provides access to the LoRa protocol for researchers and hobbyists.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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It's cool, and I'm glad they did it, but there are already chips out there that do this. This work doesn't make the chip makers any more incentivized to use this over cheap chips that already exist.
That's not what this is about.
It's about manipulating RF in software. This means that anyone can use or modify it and not be restricted to the existing hardware.
It also means that you can probably use common off the shelf components like an FPGA to implement this and still have full access and control.
This is absolutely a big deal and worthy of replication across other protocols and platforms.
Yeah, I get that, but my points still stand.
As you can read from the code, LoRa is many frequencies, and software is not the most efficient way to deal with them. Hell, the chips now even take a ton of power in comparison to BLE or WiFi.
Yes, SDR is less efficient than a specially designed radio chip, but what you gain is flexibility. With SDR, your radio can use any transmission encoding, you are mainly just limited by your polling rate.
Specially designed radio chips thrive in constrained, high-volume manufactured devices. However, for development purposes, being able to use LoRa with an SDR is an amazing step up.
Maybe you ought to look more into what GNU Radio/SDR is capable of before defending this hill you're standing on.
It's certainly not capable of flashing in one step to a chip already on board. That's the hill you're trying to climb.
GNU projects often are sucky. Implementations of things that already exist as they happen upon them and after their uptake. Then people like you come in and defend them. 95% of the time they fail because the existing solution works fine.
I couldn't spare an extra thought about using the GNU brand over another FOSS solution. Anyone in here stomping their feet about this is an absolute moron.
I am quite familiar with Lora hardware, I'm currently running 8 mesh devices. I've done the remote flashing, I've also had remote flashing disable devices and needed to reflash over USB.
This is a completely different use case.
Also, GNU ...brand?