RAKwireless' RK7246 Bundles a Raspberry Pi Zero and LoRaWAN HAT as a Low-Cost Quick-Start Gateway

RAKwireless is working to bring down the cost of setting up a LoRaWAN gateway by farming the heavy lifting off onto a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer in its latest RAK7246 family.

Designed with low-bandwidth geographically-diverse sensor networks in mind, LoRaWAN is an increasingly popular method of connecting devices over a wide area without the need to pay for subscription fees, access charges, and bandwidth fees — but there's a caveat: Although there are plenty of community-run open-access LoRaWAN networks out there, if you're outside their coverage area you'll be left setting up one of your own.

Doing so requires a LoRaWAN gateway, which sits between the LoRaWAN network and a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection to the wider internet. While there are plenty of off-the-shelf models available, they are typically expensive; on the flipside, do-it-yourself versions can be considerably more affordable but require more time and effort to set up.

RAKwireless' RAK7246 family of LoRaWAN gateways, first spotted by CNX Software, is designed to bridge the gap. Powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer — which includes a single-core 1GHz Arm processor and 512MB of RAM — the design includes a LoRaWAN add-on pHAT offering eight uplink and one downlink channels plus an external LoRa antenna in a plastic housing. An upgraded version from the base RAK7246 model, the RAK7246G, adds an on-board GPS module.

Both devices are designed to be as simple as possible to set up, with RAKwireless publishing a guide to configuring the gateway and connecting it to the community-driven The Things Network platform. Pricing, meanwhile, is competitive at $99 for the base model and $114 with GPS.

More information is available on the RAKwireless website.