Remember Sure-Fi? Lostik is open standards Lora you can play with

'A lot of readers commented on our earlier report on Sure-Fi
long-range, low-bandwidth RF chirp communicators that we should test
generic Lora gear. Lora is the open standard that Sure-Fi began with
and built on top of, and it's available in a variety of inexpensive
kits. Most of those kits are aimed at low-level maker-style
integration with IoT gear like Arduino, but I found a couple of
preassembled kits with generic USB interfaces suitable for use with
regular x86 computers. One of those, Lostik, had consistently better
user reviews and glowingly boasted of its "extensive documentation,"
so we picked a pair up for $46 apiece and got to testing.

We should be clear about one thing up front—nobody should claim that
any Lora device has "extensive documentation" with a straight face.
Lostik seems to have more documentation than any of its competitors,
but figuring out exactly what it would do felt like learning to play
pirated video games in the 1980s. What we eventually discovered was
that Lora devices are sort of like dial-up modems all connected to a
single party line—they run on serial interfaces over which they can be
issued commands and can send or receive data.

It's possible to use a generic terminal emulator (at 57,600bps, 8 data
bits, 1 stop bit, and no parity) to communicate directly with Lostik,
but you'll need to understand its commands—analogous to the Hayes AT
modem commands of yore—if you do. That was a bridge too far for us, so
we said the heck with it and just lightly modified the ./sender.py and
./receiver.py sample scripts from Lostik's Github repository and used
them for some simple range testing. These scripts don't require (or
offer) any kind of authentication or pairing; any Lora device running
receiver.py will successfully receive data from any Lora device
running sender.py within its effective range.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/lostik-usb-lora-radios/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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