Last Thursday the first TTN Enschede Meet-up was held. The Things Network (TTN) is an open infrastructure, using LoRaWan, which lets Internet of Things (IoT) devices communicate data to the cloud, from which it can be approached over regular internet connections.

What fascinates me in this, is that one can implement a city or region wide infrastructure for very little money, where normally the infrastructure is the expensive part. Especially after the TTN Amsterdam initiators ran a kickstarter campaign offering the gateways for just 200 Euro, last October. With several volunteers here in Enschede, we can quickly achieve city wide coverage, and open it up to all comers. And that is what is indeed happening, as it looks like at least 6 gateways will become available in the city soon. One gateway, which Timothy at Innovalor placed on top of the highrise of the University of Applied Sciences Saxion in the city center, is already operational, since last week. The rest will follow in June.

The meeting last Thursday of fifteen TTN and IoT interested people in Enschede was a good first encounter. Besides getting to know eachother, it was good to exchange ideas, experiences, and talk about what we could actually do once the infrastructure is in place.

As it turns out, thinking about use cases is not easy, and that will definitely need more thought and discussion.

Meanwhile one of the participants, JP, showed his LoRaWan device that measures signal strength of the mentioned gateway. On his mobile phone he combines those measurements with his phone’s GPS location. This way he built a signal strength map of the Saxion gateway while cycling around town over the course of his normal activities. The LoRaWan receiver and the map are shown below. As it turns out more people are currently doing this type of wardriving, trying to crowdsource a coverage map of the Netherlands.