Connecting to The Things Network

Out of the box The Things Uno has all the code on it to get started. All I needed to do was plug it into my laptop and open a serial monitor in the Arduino IDE at 9600 baud.

Green lights flashed, and its status printed to the console. Happy days.

-- STATUS
EUI: <eui>
Battery: 3253
AppEUI: 0000000000000000
DevEUI: <devEui>
Data Rate: 3
RX Delay 1: 1000
RX Delay 2: 2000

I followed the Uno Quick Start guide (which is really great), updated my Arduino IDE, added TheThingsNetwork library, setup my Application, added my device to the application, copied the appEui & appKey to my example sketch and uploaded it.

Everything looked happy, but then 😔

-- STATUS
EUI: <eui>
Battery: 3253
AppEUI: 0000000000000000
DevEUI: <devEui>
Data Rate: 3
RX Delay 1: 1000
RX Delay 2: 2000
-- JOIN
Model: RN2903
Version: 0.9.5
Sending: mac set deveui <devEui>
Sending: mac set adr off
Sending: mac set deveui <devEui>
Sending: mac set appeui <appID>
Sending: mac set appkey <secret>
Sending: mac save 
<snip>
Sending: mac set pwridx 5
Sending: mac set retx 7
Sending: mac set dr 3
Sending: mac join otaa 
Join not accepted: denied
Check your coverage, keys and backend status.

Join not accepted: denied. Check your coverage, keys and backend status.

Double checking the sample code and keys didn’t find any bugs, so it was time to look at The Things Network Mapper to see if I was actually in range here at Port Willunga.

Bummer. ~22.8km away from the nearest gateway, and the theoretical range of LoRaWAN is ~15km.

So I’ll take a break from connecting to the network and get back to getting The Things Uno talking to the Atlas Scientific Water Conductivity sensor. Then when that’s all sorted, I’ll take a little drive down the coast and connect that way.

I really love the setup process of The Things Network – straight forward guide, and sample code that all works perfectly. 😊

Update: Once I reached Adelaide CBD I plugged in The Things Uno again in the hope it would connect to the many close gateways… but unfortunately I had the same problem.

A quick chat in the #Adelaide channel on thethingsnetwork.slack.com and Andrew noticed that my Uno’s LoRaWAN firmware on the Microchip RN2903 is running old firmware (Version 0.9.5), and apparently it needs to be running Version 1.0.3 to connect.

Follow along as I grapple with upgrading the firmware…