Research results on reverse engineering of the LoRa protocol and an implementation in GNU Radio. An open source LoRa PHY layer project provides access to the LoRa protocol for researchers and hobbyists.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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It's cool, and I'm glad they did it, but there are already chips out there that do this. This work doesn't make the chip makers any more incentivized to use this over cheap chips that already exist.
That's not what this is about.
It's about manipulating RF in software. This means that anyone can use or modify it and not be restricted to the existing hardware.
It also means that you can probably use common off the shelf components like an FPGA to implement this and still have full access and control.
This is absolutely a big deal and worthy of replication across other protocols and platforms.
Yeah, I get that, but my points still stand.
As you can read from the code, LoRa is many frequencies, and software is not the most efficient way to deal with them. Hell, the chips now even take a ton of power in comparison to BLE or WiFi.
Yes, SDR is less efficient than a specially designed radio chip, but what you gain is flexibility. With SDR, your radio can use any transmission encoding, you are mainly just limited by your polling rate.
Specially designed radio chips thrive in constrained, high-volume manufactured devices. However, for development purposes, being able to use LoRa with an SDR is an amazing step up.