Danwhat if I told you that you could do Ethernet over LoRA?
Check out a thing I'm working on: https://github.com/datapartyjs/lorapipe
We have a roadmap here: https://github.com/orgs/datapartyjs/projects/4/views/1
APRS also Just Works™️
first: pic APRSIS32 + Windows 11 + https://store.rakwireless.com/products/rak4631-lpwan-node
second pic: Xastir + Fedora + https://www.seeedstudio.com/Wio-SX1262-with-XIAO-ESP32S3-p-5982.html
this demonstration was at very close range (~10m) using close to the fastest LoRA preset possible using this hardware: Bandwidth 500KHz, Spreading Factor 5, Coding Rate 5 (4 is less redundant, therefore faster)
Viss@Viss @nullagent and I were seeing about 12Kbit/s with iperf3, but we think that we can improve the throughput with a little bit of work.
@meph @nullagent ive fallen heavily into home assistant land, and HA recently released a zwave doodad that can talk... basically usb over wifi or PoE, and like.. extending a zwave mesh over lora sounds sexy as fuck, and thats even before talking about the possibility of pushing still images from security cams over lora point to point mode. good work, man! super keen to see where this goes!
@meph @nullagent put this lil guy on the end of lorapipe and 12kb/s is plenty fast enough to extend a zwave network off grid using lorapipe :D
Home Assistant (@[email protected])
When we launched the Connect ZWA-2, one point of feedback was clear: people want flexibility in where they could place it. Message received. 😎 Introducing Portable Z-Wave, an experimental firmware that lets you use Z-Wave over the built-in Wi-Fi or add on PoE! 🚀 Learn how it works 👇🏼 https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/10/13/portable-z-wave-with-wifi-and-poe/ #ZWave #SmartHome #HomeAutomation #OpenSource https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/10/13/portable-z-wave-with-wifi-and-poe/
Richard@yo3gnd @meph yeah for my use case scenario im trying to smash as much bandwidth possible over not too great a distance. maybe a block or two. like, lets fill the gap between too far for wifi and needs an lte radio. think of something like a nice axis camera on a solar panel and an outdoor zwave pir sensor. like a trailcam on steroids but without all the shady chinese lte backhauls or pesky verizon sneakybullshits or stingray planes/vans
@Viss @yo3gnd check out WiFi HaLow, RAK has some chips that support HaLow for a good price, check here: https://store.rakwireless.com/products/choose-other-wireless-module-with-wisgate-connect?variant=42432936804550
There's another outfit named Teledatics that has some HaLow hardware, but their website seems to be having some issues.
In the one very suboptimal test of HaLow that I did, I was able to get a couple Mbps around 2 city blocks away from the 900MHz HaLow AP, which was suboptimally placed indoors and near ground level.
nullagentThat's correct, not all LoRa modules can go below SF7. We did our testing with nodes that can do SF5 and it seemed to work very well. FSK modulation is also a bit faster than LoRa so there's some gains to supporting it.
This below calculator appears accurate with our testing.
We have not tried 2.4GHz LoRa yet, which also has some bandwidth benefits, I think it might already work, we just don't have hw to test on.
LoRa bitrate calculator and understanding LoRa parameters
It can be pretty useful to know how LoRa parameters influence data rate and range, for example when configuring your RNode. In this post I'll go over the basic concepts needed to understand the different LoRa parameters, and how they affect range and data rate.