Regio Zuid | LoRa4All

The Embedded Group is a Start-up company operated under Daniel Campora. Daniel aims to develop a small and affordable indoor LoRaWAN Gateway with a manufacturing cost of less than 20 EUR...LoRaWAN is a Low Power Wide Area Network technology built on top of the LoRa RF modulation. LoRa has a typical line of sight range of 20km, the hardware costs of building a node device are usually lower than 2 EUR, its ultra-low power consumption allow for battery operated devices to reach an autonomy of over 10 years for a wide number of use cases. Such characteristics are what put LoRaWAN as one of the most important technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) space. However, one of the factors slowing down the adoption of LoRaWAN it’s the lack of coverage. LoRaWAN requires Gateways or base stations to be in the vicinity so that a node can reach it and the message can be relayed to the outside world (i.e. the internet). This is similar to what happens in the cellular connectivity space, however with the difference that the range of a cellular base station is typically less than 1km and the costs of the hardware are much higher (many thousands of euros). Back in the early days of cellular connectivity, coverage was really poor, mobile phones were very expensive (even entry level ones) and service costs were high. With time the prices lowered, adoption increased, prices lowered even more, which increased adoption again and ~20 years later we find that cellular connectivity is pretty much everywhere. This highlights the importance of lowering the entry costs of the technology in order to increase the adoption rates..We want to help increase the speed of adoption of LoRaWAN by creating a performing ultra-low cost LoRaWAN Gateway that can be installed indoors in every building of the country. Typical performing indoor LoRaWAN Gateways available in the market at the moment can cost anywhere between 200 and 500 EUR, which is still too high to be able to bring LoRaWAN to the masses. ..Our aim is to research and find the way to build a comparable device for less than 20 EUR. Our expertise with embedded systems, connectivity and with LoRa specifically indicates to us that this might be possible but there will be challenges associated with the radiofrequency design of the hardware and the software development. .This project is related to the topsector HTSM/ICT and connects to the Missiegedreven Topsectorenbeleid KIA 5: Sleuteltechnologieën..