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BasicMAC

BasicMAC is a portable implementation of the LoRa™ Alliance's LoRaWAN™ specification in the C programming language. It is a fork of IBM's LMiC library, and supports multiple regions, which are selectable at compile and/or run time. It can handle Class A, Class B, and Class C devices.

This repository

This repository contains an Arduino port of the BasicMAC library. However, the port is done without changing the structure of the repository itself, so development can continue on other targets at the same time.

Development status

This master branch should be working, testing and contributions are welcome. There are still some rough edges, so this should not be considered a finished version. The final 2.2 release by Semtech was only recently integrated and has seen limited testing.

Initially, development of this repository has been quite unstable, with lots of history editing and rebasing, but the intention is to keep the master branch stable now (i.e. no force pushes). Rebasing and history editing might still happen in other branches and is encourage in pullrequests to keep history clean.

The API is still likely to change in a breaking way, especially wrt configuration.

Notable and breaking changes

This section lists notable changes, in particular those that can break existing sketches. For full details, see the git changelog.

• 2020-07-14: On Arduino, the default config is changed to SX1262. If your board uses SX1276 (the old default), you need to modify target-config.h in the library.

• 2020-07-14: On SX126x, DIO3 is no longer configured to control a TCXO by default. If your board needs this, it must be explicitly enabled. On Arduino, set the tcxo field of the pin map to LMIC_CONTROLLED_BY_DIO3. With Makefile-based stm32, define LMIC_DIO3_CONTROLS_TCXO on the compiler commandline.

• 2020-07-14: On SX126x, DIO2 is no longer configured to control a TXRX antenna switch by default. If your board needs this (most likely it does), it must be explicitly enabled. On Arduino, set the tx field of the pin map to LMIC_CONTROLLED_BY_DIO2. With Makefile-based stm32, define LMIC_DIO2_CONTROLS_TXRX on the compiler commandline.

Relation to other projects

BasicMAC is a privately developed fork of LMIC, which was released publically by Semtech in 2019. In 2020, Semtech has announced it no longer intends to develop or support BasicMAC, so this repository is intended to become the primary repository for BasicMAC.

This repository borrows heavily from the Arduino LMIC port that was first published at https://github.com/matthijskooijman/arduino-lmic/. There are some other LMIC versions (notably https://github.com/mcci-catena/arduino-lmic) for Arduino based off matthijskooijman's version and have seen more development, but no effort has been made to incorporate any changes from there.

Ideally, all of these LMIC and BasicMAC-based projects would unify their efforts in a repository that is not Arduino-specific, but given that there have been signficant changes in both BasicMAC and the MCCI versions compared to the original IBM LMIC version, this might be a challenge (both technically, and project-wise).

Using this repository on Arduino

This repository is not directly usable as an Arduino library, in order to keep the directory structure more generic. To use it in Arduino, there is a bash script that generates an Arduino library out of it. To do so, make a git checkout of this repository and from the root of it, run:

./target/arduino/export.sh --link ~/Arduino/libraries/BasicMAC

The --link parameter makes the script generate symlinks into the original repository, allowing you to make changes to the library there and have them reflected in the Arduino version directly. If you omit --link, copies will be made instead.

The directory name passed is created and becomes the library directory, it should be in your Arduino sketchbook's libraries directly (the path shown should work with the default Arduino IDE configuration).

This script was tested on Linux, should work on OSX as well, might work on Windows (if you have bash). For Windows, there is also a batch version of the script, which works the same, except --link is not supported.

Using this repository without Arduino

To build and upload without Arduino, a makefile-based build system is present in the projects subdirectory. It currently only supports STM32, on some specific boards.

To use it, go into the example project directory (projects/ex-join) and run make.

Some effort has been made to keep these builds working, but actual testing of the code in this repository has only been done under Arduino (Makefile-based builds are only automatically compile-tested), so the Makefile-based builds might very well be broken.

Hardware support

This port is intended to work on any Arduino board, regardless of architecture. It was tested on AVR, SAMD and STM32 boards, and with SX1272, SX1276 and SX1262 radios.

Unfortunately, BasicMAC is quite a bit bigger than LMIC, so it seems it does not fit in an atmega328p anymore. PROGMEM optimizations have not been applied yet, but those would only free up RAM, not flash (and now the ttn-otaa example compiles down to 35k of flash, with only 32k available).

So far, only EU868 has been tested. Other regions are supported, but are not currently tested.

Converting from LMIC

BasicMAC is based on LMIC and largely works in the same way. Sketches can likely be largely reused, though some small changes need to be made. See for example this commit for the changes needed to the examples.

Additionally the pinmap was significantly changed, so look at one of the current examples to see how that looks now.