Alasdair Allan's Guide Gets You Started with LoRaWAN, The Things Network on Your Raspberry Pi Pico

Raspberry Pi's Alasdair Allan has published a guide to getting up and running with LoRaWAN on the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board, courtesy of a library written by Sandeep Mistry.

"Arguably the winner of the standards war around wide area networking protocols for the Internet of Things, LoRaWAN is a low-powered, low-bandwidth, and long-range protocol," Allan explains by way of introduction. "Intended to connect battery-powered remote sensors back to the internet via a gateway, on a good day, with a reasonable antenna, you might well get 15km of range from an off-the-shelf LoRa radio. The downside is that the available bandwidth will be measured in bytes, not megabytes, or even kilobytes."

Those interested in working with LoRaWAN or another LoRa-based network can now do so quickly and easily on the $4 RP2040-powered Raspberry Pi Pico, thanks to a port of a LoRa library originally written by Sandeep Mistry for the Arduino family of microcontrollers. "His library adds LoRa support for Pico and other RP2040-based boards using the Semtech SX1276 radio module," Allan notes. "That means that breakouts like Adafruit’s RFM95W board, as well as their LoRa FeatherWing, are fully supported."

Allan's guide walks through installing the Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ software development kit (SDK), adding an application to The Things Network, a community-driven and free-to-use global collection of LoRaWAN networks, and wiring the Raspberry Pi Pico board itself to an Adafruit RFM95W LoRa Breakout before finally writing a simple temperature-reporting firmware.

The full guide is now available on the Raspberry Pi blog.