LoRa port for TARPN node

KV4P has been experimenting with adding LoRa ports to his TARPN node. LoRa is very desirable for TARPN because LoRa transceivers are very inexpensive yet have good range, are very small and low-power, and reduce the overall setup cost of a new link.

Materials:

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (~$15 when in stock), WITH gpio header. You can use any Rapsberry Pi model for this, but this is what I used.
• Adafruit LoRa Radio Bonnet with OLED - RFM95W @ 915MHz - RadioFruit ($32.50)
• 78mm of magnet wire (33cm band 1/4 wave), soldered to the radio bonnet antenna center conductor via (right next to the connector we won't use)

This assumes you already have a TARPN node. With this experimental guide, you'll be buiding a LoRa radio that shows up on your network as a TCP-based KISS TNC, which port 11 or port 12 of your TARPN node will connect to via the network.

I'm going to assume you already have the Raspberry Pi configured with Raspberry Pi OS, and connected to your local network (the same network as your TARPN node). You'll want to assign a static IP to it (rather than DHCP), so you can ensure your TARPN node will be able to find it on the network after restarts.

Get LoRa bonnet working

1. sudo apt install python3-pip
2. sudo pip3 install --upgrade setuptools
3. sudo pip3 install --upgrade adafruit-python-shell
4. wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adafruit/Raspberry-Pi-Installer-Scripts/master/raspi-blinka.py
5. sudo python3 raspi-blinka.py (this will require reboot)
6. sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-ssd1306
7. sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-framebuf
8. sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-rfm9x