You may not be acquainted with LoRa, but you are probably familiar with the Internet of Things, and LoRa is set to alter the IoT. It's a wireless technology that's used for automatic metre reading, smart parking, and livestock tracking, among other things. Its capacity to transport packets across vast distances without consuming a lot of power is what makes it so popular. As a result, it's great for delivering little quantities of data to far-flung devices. However, there is a catch, and the hitch with LoRa is that setting up these devices is difficult. With the RangePi, we tried to make things easier.

The RangePi is an open source USB dongle that enables you work with the LoRa network from any computer or device. It is built on the Semtech SX1262, SX1268 which allows your projects to communicate up to a 5 km range with auto repeating and can be used in both packet and LoRaWAN modes, making it compatible with The Things Network. Plus.

The RangePi is also compatible with Linux and boards such as the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone. You don't have to utilise your Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins because it connects via USB. IoT integrators may use the device to test and setup networks without having to carry around a development board, cable, adapters, and other components. As Osborn points out, LoRa is already in use in a variety of industries, including vineyards for weather monitoring, trains for detecting frozen railway switches, and pest management for linked mousetraps.

For those interested, the RangePi is now available for pre-order for £28 with free shipping* Buy Here, with the hardware and software sources to be posted soon to our GitHub repository. While the RangePi is very inexpensive, it is useful for anyone who wishes to connect to the LoRa network quickly.