Looking for easy-to-use Halow Gateway for industrial environments

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1

Hello World,

I’m looking for a mobile Halow AP for industrial environments. Consider a hall 100m x 30m x 30m where large steel parts are welded, sandblasted and coated. Some kind of robot needs to roam around and take measurements.

I started by using the MM8108-MF15457 module and designed a usb board for it. This board is already recognized by lsusb on a Linux machine. Then I looked at the software side and saw heaps of work. I can’t use the standard Debian or RaspiOS kernel but need a special one next to building kernel modules and utilities. And I don’t know what problems I run into when connecting other hardware (sensors, camera, motor driver,…).

So I wonder if there is an easier way out. What I would need is basically an Halow Access Point:

  • small enough to fit on some kind of robot/crawler, like a Raspberry Pi
  • power supply up to 24V DC
  • EU 868MHz band
  • works as STA/client
  • Ethernet to an onboard switch
  • no routing required, only bridging between Ethernet and Halow
  • bare pcb so I can build an enclosure around, or an enclosure robust enough for the environment

I’ve seen OpenWrt images for the MM chipsets? What would be the suitable hardware for that? Is there an OpenWrt for Pi as an SD card image?

Any ideas?

2

Hi @fchk

There is a board definition in our OpenWrt fork for this, which is probably your fastest path forward. Unfortunately we don’t build the artefact and release it on our CMS so you will have to build it yourself.

Clone the repo at GitHub - MorseMicro/openwrt · GitHub and set up your build system as in the README.
Then configure and compile for a Raspberry Pi 4 with support for USB attached MM8108 with

./scripts/morse_setup.sh -i -b rpi-4-mmeval
make -j8