2. Initial Setup

Power over Ethernet

One feature of the RAK7258 that has me excited is PoE support. This will greatly simplify installation as only one cable is needed for both power and Ethernet.

After unboxing I plugged the RAK7258 into a PoE port on my switch and within a second it was powering up.

Assigning an IP address

The next step was to find the MAC and give it a static IP address. The RAK7258 switched from a dynamic address to the DHCP assigned static address very quickly. Some devices require a reboot to discover a new address. I was quite pleased at this behaviour.

Login screen

Upon connecting to the web interface I was first presented with Chrome's Your connection is not private screen as the RAK7258 is using a self-signed certificate.

Clicking past that gets me to an OpenWRT LuCI login screen with a custom background as shown on the right.

Firmware

The RAK7258 arrived with firmware version 1.1.0035_Release r150. This version is not listed in the Release_Note.txt on the RAK7258 firmware page. The current release at this time is 1.1.0037_Release_r159.

Clicking on the link downloads V1.1.0037_Release_r159.zip which needs to be unzipped:

$ unzip LoRaGateway_1.1.0037_Release_r159.zip

Archive:  LoRaGateway_1.1.0037_Release_r159.zip

  inflating: LoRaGateway_1.1.0037_Release_r159.bin

Firmware update

Navigating with the sidebar to System -> Backup / Firmware update brings me to what I assume is a standard OpenWRT screen. I'll skip most update steps as I assume they are standard OpenWRT.

I will note that after the update was uploaded I was presented screen to verify the version, checksum and parameters. I was able to verify the checksum:

$ md5sum LoRaGateway_1.1.0037_Release_r159.bin

ac6b3058a814e7527209923768e938b4  LoRaGateway_1.1.0037_Release_r159.bin