About two years ago I have built a LoRaWAN gateway using a imst ic880a concentrator board, a ch2i board and a raspberry pi. It was built primarily to enhance the coverage in the Munich Maker Lab and the surrounding buildings. While we do have a TTN gateway on the roof, the ground around it is in its blindspot – that makes it hard to use and debug TTN devices within the space.

And where did the gateway live? In a small IKEA box that was located in my storage box. This was just a quick-fix and not supposed to last for two years – it was finally time to fix this. I took a small electrical box with DIN rail and printed a couple of customized parts on the 3D printer. The ch2i board to din rail adapter and the cover plates are on Thingiverse. The power is supplied via a PoE splitter – I like this way because it means one cable provides both, power and LAN.

The enclosure is a cheap F-Tronic one – you can get these for around 18 € on eBay. This allows us to use the gateway outside as well and keeps the dust out. For the final touch I have added a TTN sticker to the enclosure. I think the result turned out great.