LoRaWAn Server : Project being abandoned ?

[Cocoa]

Hi Petr,

Hello everybody,

I go directly to the point, hoping to be wrong about the direction that this fantastic project seems to have taken.

In this group there are no answers to user questions, in github there are no updates ... what is happening to this project?

Petr could you update us on the development and future of your LoRaWan server?

Thanks.

Cocoa

[Petr Gotthard]

Hello everyone,

 

Let me briefly explain the future of this project (from my perspective), I hope it is not so negative.

 

To date this project didn't attact any other large contributor (I wonder if it is due to the language used), so almost the entire development depends on me. Three months ago I had to change a job, which causes a higher stress and workload, so there is less time for moonlighting jobs like the lorawan-server development.

 

Also, I felt the Yin and Yang, the give-and-take was misbalanced in this project. I understand not everybody is an Erlang guru, but some (not all) of the questions being asked and issues being raised showed that people invest less effort than I expected into own investigation. It is easier to ask or raise an issue than to try fixing the problem alone, but it creates additonal load. The time invested into debugging could have been spent in development of new features. (This is a general statement, I don't mean any specific issue raised.)

 

The project is not abandoned, but I am currently missing energy for any larger development. This may change in the coming year, but nothing is guaranteed. Nevertheless, it's open-source and the code is (and will stay) on github, so everybody is welcome to contribute. The future is (should be) upon the entire project community, not only upon myself.

 

 

Kind Regards,

Petr

 

______________________________________________________________
> Od: "Cocoa" <coco...@gmail.com>
> Komu: "LoRaWAN Server Users" <lorawan...@googlegroups.com>
> Datum: 18.12.2019 15:41
> Předmět: LoRaWAn Server : Project being abandoned ?
>

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[Doug]

Well stated Petr and I completely understand and sympathize.  I've not been doing LoRaWAN for a bit but fully expect to get back to it for garden monitoring at my child's elementary school and then middle school. Your fantastic work will be part of that.

Currently I'm working with tensorflow on the http://github.com/autorope/donkeycar project( www.donkeycar.com ) and see the same thing, ie people not willing to do even basic searches for answers before asking and get upset when I effectively tell them to RTFM.

And this is a python project.

Please keep having fun and hopefully that'll include cool things for LoRaWAN Server.  Your efforts have been nothing less than amazing. Thank you!

Doug

[Cocoa]

Hi Petr,

as told by Doug, I understand and sympathize to you.

I hope the project can find programmers in Erlang who can help and start developing a community.

Unfortunately it is really difficult for anyone who is not an Erlang programmer to try to give support.

Perhaps defining better how the project is structured and starting to publish some examples of how to interface using Elixir and / or how to create plugins with pyerl could involve more people.

I think howtos can make a difference together with a clear representation of how the NS server works in erlang.

cocoa.

[Jesse Chan-Norris]

First of all, Petr, thanks for this project. I've explored other lorawan servers and the simplicity of this one has made it a pretty good fit for our use case right now.

I wanted to pick up this (nearly) year-old thread to ask about the plans (if there are any) for any upcoming releases, specifically as it relates to the 0.6.x branch, which I know hasn't seen a release since the beginning of 2019, and then 0.7.x development branch, which seems like is collecting most of the new development features.

I'm happy to start contribution beyond my tiny bug fix as there are some improvements that I think would make the software more useful for our particular use case, but I'd like to get a sense of whether 0.6.x is going to see another release, or whether that's just going to be bug fixes from now on. I would even be tempted to run the 0.7 branch, but it given, for example, the state of the React admin tools on that branch, that doesn't seem practical.

Anyway, I'm mostly following-up on this thread to start to get an updated sense about the current state of the project, and what the immediate needs are to see if I can help.

Thanks,

Jesse

[Petr Gotthard]

Hello Jesse,

 

thank you for your interest in this project. Its future depends mainly on its users and contributors. Currently there is only one active member (Alex) and I cannot make any statements on his behalf. However, new contributors are always welcome.

 

We never had enough time to maintain old releases, so I don't expect any furter 0.6.x release. The development continues on the master (0.7) branch and we never looked back. The React admin is just a beginning, there is much more to be done (but the old admin still works). I am also aware of some bugs in some connectors too, so some work is needed before a release could be done.

 

There is an architectual defficiency too-- although the project was initially aimed at erlang based applications, some external connectors have been made. Those connectors are now more widely used, so I think the project now also needs a redesign to make the connectors more easier and flexible.

I wanted to re-purpose for this the NodeRED editor, i.e. take the editor and connect it to the lorawan-server as an engine, so one could design the LoRaWAN frame processing and I/O via the flow editor. https://discourse.nodered.org/t/design-runtime-editor-split/7219

That sounds cool, but it requires an extensive JavaScript/NodeRED expertise, so this plan failed.

 

Anyway, this project is not dead-- it awaits fresh ideas of new contributors and their coding skills. Good way to start is to discuss the ideas here, or make smaller pull requests directly to GitHub. I can help with the maintenance and other things, but at this moment cannot do any significant contributions.

 

As a general remark (not related to you in person), I am quite disappointed that several companies, even large ones, use(d) the server in their products and never contributed anything. The idea of open-source software does not work when people only take and never give anything back. Paying for integration and support does not help either, because until the project is large enough it does not pay for the living, so people need to have anothe job.

 

 

Kind Regards,

Petr

 

______________________________________________________________
> Od: "Jesse Chan-Norris" <j...@pith.org>

> Komu: "LoRaWAN Server Users" <lorawan...@googlegroups.com>

> Datum: 09.11.2020 08:22
> Předmět: Re: LoRaWAn Server : Project being abandoned ?
>

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[Александр Тищенко]

Speaking of connectors and releases! %)

Can we make a 'technical' release? At least to get rid of tuple_calls in mongodb connector - it seems that for some obscure reasons on some installations this trick just doesn't work as expected, hence all this 'badarg in apply()' concerning mongo usage. Just two lines of code to change..

Cheers,

Alex

вс, 15 нояб. 2020 г. в 21:44, Petr Gotthard <petr.g...@centrum.cz>:

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