The Things Network

The Things Network, commonly known as TTN, is an open source infrastructure aiming at providing a free LoRaWAN network cover. This project is developed by a growing community across the world, and is based on voluntary contributions to the project. Their website presents different guides to allow people to deploy gateways in their city to grow the network. These antennas provide both long range coverage with LoRa and short range with Bluetooth 4.2. Thanks to the open source developments on the source code and on the infrastructure, their coverage is already quite good in big cities and it is spreading in smaller ones.

How does it work?

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In order to use the TTN network, you must first create an account. This is totally free of any charge, as it is the philosophy of this community to provide a totally free and open network. This account allows you to create different applications fitted for your needs.

A TTN application gives you access to several parameters:

• your application ID (allows you to identify your nodes on the network
• the registered devices (your sensors, their state and the data they are sending)
• a payload decoder (short instructions used to interpret the incoming messages)
• general settings of your application (e.g. security, network keys, activation type, …)

Once your application is functional, you must register a device to use it. This will give you the necessary keys and IDs to connect a node to the network and collect its data. Once a host has joined the network, you can access the data it sends in real time, either directly through the TTN interface, or via other data collection services (for example Node-Red).

Sources

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https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/