RAK7258 Review

Initial Setup and Firmware Update

Exploring the GUI

LoRa Specifc Screens

I'll mostly concentrate on the LoRa specific screens, assuming that most of the rest of these are standard OpenWRT. I'm not positive on that as I haven't used OpenWRT in a few years.

Change Password!

After the firmware update finished and logging in the first thing to do navigate using the sidebar to System -> Administration and change the login password to something other than root.

I used LastPass to generate and save a 32 character password containing letters, numbers and symbols. This was accepted without issue.

System -> Overview

When you log in, you are presented with System -> Overview page. The top two rows of panels display LoRa specific info. Next is row has system info and memory usage. The final two provide network information.

Notice that the Wireless appears to support an uplink as well as AP mode.

System -> LoRaWAN Packet Logger

This page looks very handy. A packet logger with some available filtering tools. Including the ability to dive into the packet contents.

LoRaWAN Packet Logger page

Packet Type filtering options

Expanding the view of a packet

System -> System Log

This screen doesn't sounce LoRa specific at first. But you you look at the log you will see that it's providing the lora_pkt_fwd log entries.

LoRaWAN Pages

The two pages under this section are specific to LoRaWAN and all have the same info on the bottom half, which I'll cover below.

LoRa Packet Forwarder

The top half of this section has three tabs, but there are some options that change what is displayed.

Top Half of LoRa Packet Forwarder page

General Setup tab with Semtech UDP GWMP Protocol selected

General Setup tab with LoRa Gateway MQTT Bridge selected

Beacon Setup tab

GPS Information tab which allows configuration of Fake GPS

LoRa Gateway MQTT Bridge

These pages allow configuration of something I need to figure out and document XXX

LoRa Gateway MQTT Bridge Configuration tab with Authentication disabled

LoRa Gateway MQTT Bridge Configuration tab with Authentication enabled. Supported versions of TLS are v1, v1.1 and v1.2

MQTT Topic Template Setup tab

Bottom Half of LoRaWAN Pages

The bottom half of both pages allows configuration of the radios. The release notes for this version include this interesting tidbit

V1.1.0037_Release_r159

Update note:

1. Web management platform supports status preview interface to show GPS information. "--" means that the positioning failed, and latitude and longitude information means that the positioning succeeded.

2. The Web Management Platform supports 8 channel devices to add a LoRa concentrator to 16 channels. (Only RAK7249 DIY Gateway is supported this funtion)

3. Modify the default configuration of the MQTT template for the LoRaGateway MQTT Bridge

4. Optimizing firmware to improve the stability

So with the RAK7249 DIY Gateway you can install a second LoRa concentrator to build a 16 channel gateway.

Radio Configuration tab

TX Gains tab