Achievements:

Currently our system is able to transmit data from the PIC32 via LoRa radio to a receiver. The distance of this transmission can at least be the distance from the data site to the Public Safety building. Once this data is received it will be written to a csv file for later use and viewing.

Our system is also able to transmit at regular intervals. We tested using the RTCC for 10 seconds but we believe there’s no reason why it should not work for an hour. Along with the RTCC, we have an interrupt that allows us to use it as a wake up from sleep mode. Sleep mode was an important feature to have in our system as we want to limit as much power consumption as possible.

We expected to have a full completed prototype that would be ready to be soldered and brought down to the site however we ran into problems with data retrieval. That part of the design has yet to be implemented and tested because of the issue with communicating with the data logger.

All in all, we were able to meet some standards with being able to successfully transmit over the intended distance. We could transmit different data from the PIC32 as well and as was mentioned before our reception of the data can be seen from a csv file. The standard that we did not meet that we set at the beginning of this project was the data retrieval, however we have the infrastructure around it so once data retrieval works we will be very close to a finished system.

Intellectual Property:

We did modify code that was not initially ours.

One code that we modified was for the processing script (which is found in our References section.) This processing script contained the general idea for writing to a txt file from an Arduino but we modified it to write to a csv file and continuously write to a csv file when data is available instead of just writing once and finishing.

Another piece of code that we modified was from the Adafruit Feather guide which gave example code for setting up the LoRa radio transmitters and receivers. We modified the transmitter to send data it got via UART and we modified the receiver to output the data it is receiving so it can be written to the csv file. This guide can also be found in our References section.

We don’t believe we are exactly reverse engineering a design but we are following a protocol that was outlined in the CR10X manual to be able to effectively communicate and get data out of the device.

Legal Considerations:

There is the EP 1072904 A3 patent which was filed in Europe. This limits the effect the patent has in the United States. However, regardless of that fact, we believe that our system is different enough and does not infringe on this patent.

Another legal consideration is the frequency which we are transmitting at. 915MHz is deemed a legal frequency to use as it is an unlicensed band and the FCC does not place many restrictions on it. Therefore, our design is legal in this part.