Category: Open Source

Deployment ready NB-IoT device review — Unboxing the Dragino N95S31B(14 min read)

The Dragino NBSN95/NBSN95A family is a deployment-ready range of water resistant NB-IoT (Narrow Band Internet of Things) devices that are available pre-packaged with various sensors such as soil moisture, distance detection, liquid level, and temperature/humidity sensors.

NB-IoT is a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology that allows devices to be accessed in remote locations and operate on battery for long periods of time, up to many years.

In this article we will look a the N95S31B, the model with the pre-packaged temperature/humidity sensors, the strengths and weaknesses of the device, and then walk through configuing the device and see it connect to an MQTT test server. Our previous article showed you how to set up an MQTT test server on Azure if needed.

The NBSN95 is an open source project, with both the software and hardware specifications available, if you need to customise the application. We have also previously reviewed the Dragion LDDS75 LoRaWAN device.

Dragino wiring the serial connection

Continue reading Deployment ready NB-IoT device review — Unboxing the Dragino N95S31B(14 min read)

Instrumenting .NET with OpenTelemetry(15 min read)

In this post we will cover how to the the built in support for OpenTelemetry in modern .NET to instrument your distributed application for tracing and logging, how the OpenTelemetry Collector can be used to simplify instrumention, and how the OpenTelemetry Protocol is building a (brilliant) connected future.

We have already seen how distributed tracing is supported in .NET via W3C Trace Context propagation, with automatic (or mostly automatic) support across HttpClient calls and messaging.

We will now go further than logging and look at tracing. Tracing looks at the different units of work (spans) done during an operation (trace), how they are connected, and the timings of the different components. This is an important tool for investigating performance issues in distributed systems.

An example distributed trace timeline, across multiple components, viewed in Jaeger, one of many supported tools:

Example Jaeger trace output

As well as looking at individual traces timings can be aggregated across the system to find the slowest areas, and identify anomalies.

Continue reading Instrumenting .NET with OpenTelemetry(15 min read)

Unboxing the Dragino LPS8 LoRaWAN gateway(8 min read)

I recently got a Dragino LPS8 LoRaWAN gateway and set it up on my network. The LPS stands for LoRaWAN Pico Station.

The open source gateway runs a variant of OpenWRT and the latest version supports a range of LoRaWAN features including Basic Station. You can use it for a private network or set it up with a community as I did for The Things Network (TTN).

Unboxing the Dragino LPS8 LoRaWAN gateway

Read on for details of how easy it was to set it up securely.

Continue reading Unboxing the Dragino LPS8 LoRaWAN gateway(8 min read)