LoraAPRS

Besides the classic APRS on 2 m, same OMs experiment with off the shelf LoRa transceivers.

Requirements:

PlatformIO core

Most installation descriptions describe the installation using a full installation of PlatformIO with IDE. But, the installation is also possible on the command with just PlatformIO Core. Just follow one of their installation methods. For example:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/platformio/platformio-core-installer/master/get-platformio.py -O get-platformio.py
python3 get-platformio.py

Installation on the tracker

After the installation of platform.io, we can directly call pio. Alternatively, you can add it to the PATH. The environment is specfied with -e. You can see the enviroments in the platformio.ini file.

~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t cleanall
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t upload

The configuration must be modified in data/tracker.json before installation.

~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t buildfs
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t uploadfs

Installation on the iGate

~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t cleanall
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t upload

The configuration must be modified in data/is-cfg.json before installation.

~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t buildfs
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t uploadfs

Telemetry

I modified the code to send proper APRS telemetry messages of type PRAM, UNIT, EQNS and T. You find this source code on GitHub. The core frequency is reduced to 80 MHz and the NMEA parser is interrupt based. Thus, the power consumptino is reduced by around 20 percent.