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In my continuing series about programming WisBlock RAK 11310 devices using the native RP2040 SDK and the LoRaMac-node library, this article focuses on retrieving the current date and time from the LoRa gateway and setting the device real time clock. In addition to sending sensor readings to a central server via LoRaWan, the devices that…

The LoRaWan specification indicates that a device can only use a dev-nonce once. If the device powers down and needs to re-establish a connection to a LoRa Gateway it either needs to start at 1 and step through each value until one that has not been used is found, or it needs to store the…

The RAK12002 WisBlock RTC module is a low cost extremely low power real time clock module based on the RV-3028-C7 from Micro Crystal. It only consumes 40 nA and also has 43 bytes of non-volatile user memory. Rather than a battery backup it has a small super capacitor that will operate the device for a…

Although it is convenient and popular to use The Things Network (TTN) to receive LoRaWan messages I decided not to go this route for a couple of reasons. First when I received my RAK2245 gateway I tried to register it but was not able to because the gateway’s EUI was already registered. Perhaps I received…

Part 6 in my Exploring Wisblock series RAK Wireless provides Arduino and Platform IO libraries for the various WisBlock modules, including LoRaWan. I have had trouble working with them, as noted in my other posts, but they also are not able to take advantage of the second RP2040 core. Therefore I have been using the…

Part 5 in my Exploring Wisblock series Source code for this example can be found here. Many sensors are deployed in the field and not connected to wifi or ethernet. The device may send LoRa messages to a gateway and/or it may have a display that needs to be read. In order for such a…

Part 4 in my Exploring WisBlock Series – Read Accelerometer Data on Core 1 Source code for this example can be found here. My goal in this series of articles has been to develop a device that could read and process accelerometer data on one core of a RP2040 microcontroller and display and communicate the…

Part 3 in my Exploring Wisblock series Source code for this example can be found here. The RAK11310 Core module is based on the RP2040, the microcontroller used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. This is a dual core Arm Cortex-M0+ processor so I was curious to see if the second core can be used in…

Part 2 in my Exploring Wisblock series I’ve been working with e-paper displays for a few years, starting with the PaPirus Raspberry Pi HAT and more recently with Waveshare 2.7 inch e-paper HAT. The Papirus seemed to have quality issues and over time the displays would deteriorate. I have not had any significant problems with…

Part 1 in my Exploring Wisblock series I’ve been developing a custom sensor HAT for Raspberry Pi for a few years but with the shortage of Pis I decided to explore other options. One intriguing option is the RAK Wireless WisBlock ecosystem. These are building block components that promise very easy assembly, a wide variety…