Fundamentally LoRa is a physical layer specification enabling very long range, low power albeit at low data rate RF communications.
This makes it ideal for enabling IoT technology devices in urban areas, providing significantly large link budgets. (Link budgets takes into account all the gains e.g. antenna, and losses e.g. walls, reflections, for a given radio link, allowing a reasonable estimate of the range capacity of the link.)
There is an official alliance which also talks about their LoRaWAN stack for compliant devices.
HopeRF are official Semtech technology product developers. They have used this technology offering prepackaged and rugged modules. This provides for easy interface and competitive volume costing.
Of particular note is their AT Command friendly HM-TRLR series of modules. These only use a simple UART TTL level interface to your micro-controller of choice!. For direct RS232 applications you will need to add a level converter.
These are offered in both 433MHz and 915MHz bands. For more details see the datasheet.
Interesting articles:-
(Note, we have not directly vetted these links or authors therefore use this information with due diligence.)
- LoRa tutorial by Radio-Electronics
- LoRa Alliance
- LoRaWAN
- Semtech based HopeRF modules
- Dev Board
- IoT
- LinkLabs
- Forum
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