Connecting Loriot LoRaWAN© network server to your IoT Hub

LoRaWAN© and Loriot Overview

LoRaWAN© is a low-power, low-bandwidth, long-range radio protocol used by many devices to send their data over the air. This protocol is specifically designed for battery powered devices with little to no installation cost.

LoRaWAN© devices broadcast their data to reachable LoRaWAN© gateways, which forward the messages on the LoRaWAN© operator network. The operator de-duplicates the messages from multiple gateways and hand over the message to the “LoRaWAN© application”. In our scenario, the “LoRaWAN© application” is Scaleway IoT Hub.

Loriot is a LoRaWAN© network server provider on which to connect your LoRaWAN© gateways and build your private LoRaWAN© network.

In this tutorial we are going to:

Create a IoT Hub to receive/send messages from/to LoRaWAN© devices
Add a Device to the Hub to prepare the Loriot-to-Scaleway connection
Set up the Loriot backend to use the Device credentials to establish a connection with IoT Hub
Add another Device and connect it as a subscriber to receive LoRaWAN© messages

Create an IoT Hub

First, we need to create a Hub. Its role will be to distribute messages from your LoRaWAN© devices to the intended targets. Please follow this procedure to create an IoT Hub if you don’t have one already. The hub’s name and plan does not matter for this tutorial.

Create an IoT Device

The Loriot platform will connect as a MQTT device to exchange data on IoT Hub. This means that we need to add a Device to the IoT Hub. Please follow this procedure to create a device.

Notes:

Use the Allow Insecure connections setting.
The device name is not important for this tutorial.

Once done, copy the Device ID, you will need them to set up the Loriot backend.

Set up the Loriot backend

Now IoT Hub is ready to exchange messages, let’s configure the Loriot side:

Go to your Loriot Dashboard
Click on Applications and select your application in the list
Click on Output in the left pane, click Add a new output and choose MQTT
Fill in the following parameters:
- MQTT Broker URL: your IoT Hub Endpoint, followed by MQTTs port (ex: iot.fr-par.scw.cloud)
- MQTT Path: the MQTT topic to publish messages to, set it to my-app/{DEVEUI}/uplink.
- Username: you can’t leave this field empty, so just write x here, it won’t be used
- Password: you can’t leave this field empty, so just write x here, it won’t be used
- Client ID: your IoT Hub Device ID
That’s it, click Add Output button

Please note that there is an additional step to be performed if you are using a Loriot private network server. You should get in touch with your Loriot representative for this.

Verify we have done things right

It is time to see messages flowing on IoT Hub:

Create another IoT Hub Device, but this time choose the Allow Insecure connections setting. Secured connections are not supported over Web Sockets, which the MQTT Webclient uses.
On the Device page, click the MQTT Webclient button. The client will open and automatically connect.

Now subscribe to the LoRaWAN© devices messages:
- Click Add New Topic Subscription in the Subscriptions block
- Pick any color to identify this subscription
- Leave QoS 0
- Use my-app/+/uplink as the topic, this will instruct IoT Hub to send you uplink messages from all devices
- Click subscribe

Your subscription now appears in the Subscriptions block and the messages from your LoRaWAN© devices will start showing in the Messages block.

Congratulations! Messages are flowing as expected.

Going further

You could leverage the power of IoT Hub to build a dashboard to display your data in a few easy steps:

Start a PostgreSQL managed DB instance and create a lora table with the following fields: time (timestamp type) and data (jsonb type)
Configure a Database Route to push data in there, see how to. The topic filter should be my-app/+/uplink. Your query should look like INSERT INTO lora (time, data) VALUES (NOW(), $PAYLOAD).
Start a new Scaleway instance and setup Grafana, get inspiration from this tutorial (steps 1 to 14, don’t enable TimescaleDB option).
Add widgets to your dashboard, for a graph your query could look like SELECT time, data->'bat' as batteryLevel FROM lora WHERE $__timeFilter(time).

Learn more about Scaleway IoT Hub, discover how to add Devices to the hub, check the IoT Hub metrics or get started in a few clicks with the IoT Hub Kickstarts.