More LoRaWAN RF madness. The Tektelic Kona Pico Gateway

So earlier I wrote about the Dragino, a small & economical Lora gateway. But I was a bit sad that it was a single-channel, technically not compliant (although it does work). I was glad to see the open-source strategy of the Dragino, it was openwrt and the code was all there.

Today on yours truly’s desktop is a new toy. Its like christmas! Its a Tektelic Pico Gateway. Tektelic is a Calgary AB-based LoRa-WAN company, and the pico-gateway @ $150 is pretty affordable.

Seems to be powered by a Freescale Kinetis ARM (MK64FN1M0VMD12) backed by a Semtech sx1308.

OK, lets give it a quick go. Interestingly it has hard-coded in opendns as a resolver (208.67.222.222) and starts looking up pool.ntp.org and tek-ns-us.thingsboard.io. Probably want to configure your own pool there is my guess for NTP. If we open a browser to that tek-ns-us (interesting, its a -ca company!), https://tek-ns-us.thingsboard.io/login, we find it has a login screen and not much else.

The manual also talks about a WiFi AP as ‘KonaPicoAP_#SN’, but i don’t see that. I tried both with and without Ethernet plugged in. With Ethernet plugged in, it flashes the front led quickly, without, its more slowly. OK, so back to Ethernet it is.

Giving it an IP, but denying it Internet, doesn’t seem to have much to say on any port. The manual suggest at this stage to get a TFTP client and put the firmware on. It then shows configuring it via a combination of JSON and TFTP (technologies from very different decades :). Good thing this is an industrial product, its a bit obtuse that step.

I don’t see the firmware on the website, so i guess i will pause for a bit.

ps the LED is pure white, and has roughly the same brightness as the sahara sun at noon.