I’ve posted on the community forums at ST. I’ve received no response.
I’ve tried each of the serial ports on the LoRa-E5 development board, and the best I was able to do was get the same serial uart results as I get over USB.
I’ve installed/updated the drivers for the USB to serial/CP2104 and that got me to the same place.
The connectivity seems to work, but it won’t actually program the device.
Unfortunately unless there’s a new development I’m going to have to switch my project to better supported hardware.
Things I need:
Useable point to point. The current AT command set is all in on LoRaWAN, but that excludes the possibility of handling a point to point which I need (or my costs skyrocket) until the project justifies multiple gateways. The TEST mode point to point is a kludge.
Ability to restore AT command set. I bought the loRa-e5 development board to do development on the board, I didn’t realize doing so would cause me to lose functionality. It’s a one-way process. (I would be fine with having to restore a binary blob to gain that functionality again.)
Basically, if I build a proof of concept that utilizes the LoRA-E5 Dev board and we don’t proceed with a custom build I can’t just switch it back to the AT command set and use it, I’ll end up tossing it in the junk drawer and having to use another device for development. This is particularly disappointing with this board, as it has the connectors broken out to be used, but the only way to use them is to drop the AT command set.
I have one last attempt at using the systems I have to update the firmware on the board, I’ll be trying to get Linux running and use that version of the STM32 Programmer to update the board, unfortunately I don’t hold out much hope for that on the systems I have. (2 intel Macs, and the rest of my systems are ARM based).
Seeed isn’t responsible for the lack of support on Mac (and I’ll even concede Apples made it a little difficult in the last couple years for tools like this anyway), but I don’t have a budget to burn and need to work with what I’ve got.
Seeed should work out the licensing issue with the AT command set (if that’s what it is), to at least allow restoring the firmware.
I’d recommend updating it to have a supported point to point mode built in as well.
(I fundamentally disagree with the general community being completely antagonistic to point-to-point. I can turn around and buy devices for the same frequency band that cause worse interference than a few point to point LoRa links ever will and still be 100% compliant).
By my estimates there’s 5 gateways on public networks in my city, 4 of which are all within 500 meters of each other, and absolutely none in locations which benefit me. I can’t justify buying a gateway for a one-off device that’s outside of a pre-existing gateway area. While I have a gateway on order for my specific location, I expect to have a half dozen devices in use here.
(I intend to have a weather station installed at a location that is well outside of range of any pre-existing gateway. I can locate a second LoRa node device there as a point to point receiver, but a Gateway is simply overkill).
Instead I’ll have to reevaluate if I should be using some other base hardware.