The free software building blocks will enable developers to bring LoRa-based applications to market faster, the company says
Semtech Corporation, a leading supplier of high-performance analog and mixed signal semiconductors and advanced algorithms, has announced the release of LoRa Basics, a set of basic software building blocks, as open source.
Semtech says its new LoRa Basics suite will assist solution developers to bring new innovative IoT products to market faster, easier, more reliably and more cost effectively.
“LoRa Basics is fully compliant with LoRa Alliance and allows developers as well as enterprises to rapidly develop their applications,” said Steven Hegenderfer, Senior Director of the Developer Ecosystem in Semtech’s Wireless Sensing and Products Group.
Semtech explains –
The impetus behind LoRa Basics is to take the common LoRaWAN functions that all developers of end devices, gateways or LoRaWAN-based solutions must implement and provide a free, supported set of open source software that is specification compliant. The building blocks represent best practices for the implementation of LoRaWAN-based technologies. Developers can then focus on developing their solutions, while getting their applications to market faster with less cost.
LoRa Basics suite a boon for IoT market
“There is a real need in the IoT market to simplify the development of IoT solutions and speed up deployments. LoRa Basics is a welcome addition to the market that we believe will help to achieve this and assist developers in focusing more on new value adding opportunities,” said Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO of IoT analyst firm Beecham Research.
The first basic software building block, LoRa Basics Station, was announced and simultaneously released on GitHub in January 2019. LoRa Basics Station is a new LoRaWAN-based gateway packet forwarder with secure and robust data communication and remote gateway management protocols, which are equally suitable to Linux-based gateways as well as resource-constrained embedded gateways.
LoRa Basics MAC, the second basic building block released on Tuesday, provides the firmware an end-device developer needs to get LoRaWAN-based radios up and running. In addition to a fully LoRaWAN-compliant protocol stack, it provides an event-driven run time with power management, timer handling and a flexible simulation environment with logical time to facilitate debugging and regression testing.
In the future, Semtech plans to include firmware updates over the air (FUOTA), both on the end-device and on the backend server, as well as data science notebooks for offline performance analytics.
Commenting on the release, Marcel Wappler, Head of IoT & LPWAN at Miromico, stated, “Semtech’s new LoRa Basics suite brings extensive improvements and much sought-after functionality in one significant leap to LoRa-based nodes and gateways.”
Semtech is making all LoRa Basics releases available on its LoRa Developer Portal, which also provides access to a comprehensive suite of developer training, documentation, technical resources and community tools.
