[aprssig] SmartBeaconing implementation wanted

Wed Aug 10 04:41:37 EDT 2022

You might want to take a look at these LoRa projects:

1) DL3CW's APRSCube:
- Project website: https://github.com/dl3dcw/APRScube
- User forum: https://forum.aprs-dl.de/showthread.php?tid=31
(German language only - sorry)

Frank / DL3DCW is very open to feature enhancement requests. The
APRSCube performs great even in the rural parts of Germany. Due to
using M5Stack-based hardware, users can  install additional
GPS/temperature/extra battery/QRO modules, if needed.One of the
APRSCubes is installed in my car and even though it does not yet
support a full smart beaconing algorithm, the results are surprisingly
good. Additionally, due to the M5Stack's form factor, the device is
more portable than e.g. one of these T-Beams.

----

2) OE5BPA's LoRa iGate/Tracker:
- iGate: https://github.com/lora-aprs/LoRa_APRS_iGate
- Tracker: https://github.com/lora-aprs/LoRa_APRS_Tracker

Tracker does not support smart beaconing but might be useful as a
starting point. I run a T-Beam powerer iGate with this software.

Joerg / DF1JSL

On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 12:31 AM John Gorkos <jgorkos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/7/22 08:01, Jason KG4WSV wrote:
> > Thanks for sharing. APRS over LoRa has been on my radar for a while now, just haven’t gotten around to it.
> >
> > Are you using LoRa or the full LoRaWAN stack?
> >
> > -Jason
> >
> >
> Just the Lora phy layer, not LoraWAN.  I have a TTN gateway at the
> house, as well as two HNT miners, but I don't need the full suite for
> something like this.  All of the encryption and modulation-dependent
> frequency schemes are overkill.
>
> The setup is pretty straightforward:  6 eBikes with big batteries, each
> with a 915Mhz Lora tracker.  Because Burning Man is a completely
> contained event, the absolute farthest a bike can get from my camper is
> 3400 meters.  I'll be using a SF9/125KHz chirp, which should be about
> 250ms on air time, and just use non-slotted Aloha on the bikes.  Range
> should NOT be a problem. Here at the house, I routinely hear and am
> heard by a station 110 km away.
> The trackers are an ESP32 with BLE enabled (for configuration
> management) but NOT Wifi, and a UBlox 6 GPS, with a Semtech 1276 LoRa
> radio.  Combined, they pull about 130mA, so a 3000mAh LiPo will give me
> about 20 hours to go track down the dirty hippy that rode off with my bike.
> I'm not really worried about about bandwidth usage or collisions: I'm
> using a 125kHz chirp on a basically random frequency between 902 and
> 928MHz.  I just want to use SmartBeaconing to save battery life.  I'm
> using a standard APRS Compressed Position Report, with course/speed
> only, as the payload, with an additional two bytes to indicate
> transmission number.  That's more for curiosity sake, to see what my
> throughput numbers actually are.
> I did something almost identical here
> https://github.com/ab0oo/lora_drone_tracker for a university advisor and
> his students, to allow them to track their drones in real time.  That's
> just a fixed 1-second transmit rate, but I'll update it with
> SmartBeaconing when I get the library hammered out.
>
> There seems to be a lot of APRS-over-LoRa in Europe, but LoRa is also
> more popular in Europe in general.  most of it is down at 433MHz.
>
> The Lily TT-GO T-Beams (also called "meshtastic devices") are pretty
> slick pieces of kit, but the form factor is atrocious. Putting the USB
> jack on one long edge, and the SMA connector for the antenna on the
> opposite long edge is a prime example of a design engineer never using
> his product.  I'm using the Heltec ESP32 Lora dev boards and the Heltec
> CubeCell AB0-2S dev boards. The CubeCells are SAMD based and don't have
> BLE, but that's a use-case I have.
>
> The ESP32 devices will also be using the FastLED library to drive a 1M
> strip of addressable LEDs, because it gets REAL DARK at night in the
> middle of the desert, and if you're not lit up like a Christmas tree,
> some dirty hippy WILL run into you on his (probably stolen) eBike at
> 15MPH.  I'll use the BLE on my phone to control the light pattern, and
> set the smartbeacon params.
>
> There's no real rocket science here; at this point, with all of the
> Arduino-compatible libraries, and all of the "dev kit" hardware
> available in 24 hours from Amazon, it's really like hardware and
> software Legos:  just keep putting pieces together until it looks like a
> spaceship.
>
> I'll do a little writeup on the whole system when I'm done, including
> pictures.  Not really worthy of a Dayton presentation, but someone might
> find them useful for tracking cub scouts or RC boats or something.
>
> de AB0OO
> John Gorkos
>
>
>
> >> On Aug 6, 2022, at 6:29 PM, John Gorkos <jgorkos at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> This is perfect.  I'm hacking it up now.
> >>
> >> Once I have it working, I'll put the code I'm using it in up on github and post the link to the project here.  All attribution will remain in the code.  I guess that's in contrast to what I said before, but it's possible other ham will want an arduino version of the SB code for their projects, and if I'm going to go through the effort of porting it, I might as well save someone else that effort.  Also, SmartBeacon is pretty good at saving bandwidth, and I think that's something we all appreciate.
> >>
> >> John Gorkos
> >>
> >>
> >>> On 7/29/22 18:02, Tom Russo wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 12:07:30PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <jgorkos at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> >>>> Does anyone have a link to any C/C++ code that implements the complete
> >>>> SmartBeaconing algo??? It's for a non-commercial, personal project.?? End
> >>>> product is a tracker for my bike at Burning Man, using 915MHz LORA as the
> >>>> phy channel.?? Target hardware is a Heltec HTCC-AB02S.
> >>>> Appropriate attribution will be provided, but I really don't plan on
> >>>> republishing the code.?? I just don't want some hippy taking off with my new
> >>>> electric bike without a way to hunt him down.
> >>> There is a C implementation in Xastir.  GPLed, feel free to use in any
> >>> license-compatible manner (such as you have already described) if it is useful.
> >>>
> >>> See
> >>> https://github.com/Xastir/Xastir/blob/master/src/db.c
> >>> around line 16045 (where the comments for function "compute_smart_beacon"
> >>> begin --- function itself is at line 16135)
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> aprssig mailing list
> >>>> aprssig at lists.tapr.org
> >>>> http://lists.tapr.org/mailman/listinfo/aprssig_lists.tapr.org
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