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How to integrate a LoRA Gateway with Onesait Platform?

How to integrate a LoRA Gateway with Onesait Platform?

13/09/21

onesait Platform is ready to receive incoming messages from a LoRa Gateway. LoRa technology is a Low Power Wide Area Communication technology operating at the 868 MHz band in Europe. Thanks to a spread-spectrum scheme, it offers strong resiliency and the ability be decoded even with the signal power being weaker than noise level. LoRaWAN is a popular choice of network technology implemented over LoRa and has a strong presence as an IoT enabling communication technology.

For the integration, we will use an Ethernet-backed Multitech Conduit Gateway, which deploys full working network around it.

After properly assembling your gateway following Multitech instructions, you need to be connected to the same local network the gateway is connected to, to access its web-based configuration. Navigating to the gateway’s IP, a webpage will appear with a login (admin:admin).

 

Navigate then to “APPs” menu at the left of the screen to launch node-red:


Configure node-red flow diagram to get device messages and send them to Onesait Platform. There are three main nodes:

  • The “Lora” node encapsulates an interface receiving data from nearby LoRaWAN devices.
  • We add a function node (called “Sofia4C API web encoder”) that adds some information to devices payload and sets up the skeleton required by Onesait Platform.
  • The data is sent through HTTP request, as defined in “HTTP POST” node.


At this point, you are switching to onesait Platform, at https://www.onesaitplatform.online/controlpanel/login with an user with role DEVELOPER. The integration needs you to create the needed elements in the platform to properly accommodate incoming LoRaWAN data. These elements are the minimum needed to achieve this integration:

  1. An Ontology agreeing to a common data model.
  2. An API to act as the inbound data endpoint.

For the Ontology creation process, navigate to the Data Modelling Menu, and construct the Ontology based on EmptyBase. We called it LoRaWAN_RAW (remember that there cannot be two ontologies with the same name in the same environment, meaning that, if you are following the tutorial in CloudLab, you may have to use another name or add your initials at the end):


 For the API creation process, navigate to the API Manager Menu and create a new API, featuring at least one INSERT operation:


 



After these steps, all the minimum requirements are set. Switch back to Node-red and set  eht function node “Sofia4C API web encoder” and “HTTP POST” nodes. 

  • The function node generates the required message template. This node adds the Ontology name to the payload to comply with the JSON Schema. It also adds two necessary headers, “content type” (application/json) and “x-sofia2-apikey” (security token from API Manager tokens).


  • The “HTTP POST” node is configured with the data from the API created. It should look like this:

 Now that everything is set up, we can check the new data by composing a simple query on the LoRaWAN_RAW ontology:



With the integration done, data can be leveraged using the platform tools. This time we will set up a Dashboard with a line chart to show the RSSI. These are the steps to follow:

  • Create a Datasource querying the LoRaWAN_RAW Ontology.
  • Set up a Line Chart using the previous datasource.