We did 60 bays for a shopping centre car park last year with plain LoRaWAN and it’s been fine. You don’t need anything special for a pilot. What we built:
Gateway is a Basics Station gateway on a lamp post (the old UDP packet forwarder is not supported, so check yours speaks Basics Station). Sensors added as OTAA devices. If you have 40 to do, pairing mode saves a lot of typing, but it needs a shared AppKey on the profile, which our puck vendor wouldn’t give us, so we added all 60 as OTAA devices by hand. Not fun, budget an afternoon.
The vendor only shipped a JavaScript decoder. Hermetry doesn’t run decoder scripts at all, codecs are JSON tables. Ours was a layout frame on FPort 2 and took 15 minutes:
{
"id": "t.bay-puck",
"title": "In-ground parking puck",
"vendor": "Example maker",
"fports": [2],
"kind": "layout",
"frames": [{ "fport": 2, "min_length": 3, "fields": [
{ "at": 0, "field": "occupied", "fmt": "u8" },
{ "at": 1, "field": "battery_mv", "fmt": "u16be" }
]}],
"tests": [{ "name": "car present", "fport": 2, "hex": "010E74", "expect": { "occupied": 1, "battery_mv": 3700 } }]
}Send occupied as 0/1, then charts can draw it. For the map we made each bay an asset with its coordinates under a “Main Street” site and placed the sensor under it, then a map card on Status under an asset. Free/occupied colour comes from the site status.
Last thing: a Device offline rule on the profile. With a 6 hour heartbeat, use Recent message with interval 21600 and factor 2, otherwise dead pucks hide for days.