LoRaWAN anybody experimenting with this?

[Larz60+]

I have been following the advancements of LoRaWAN over the past few years, because the concept of a tiny little transceiver operating WAN without internet has fascinated me. There is now a development kit available for a measly 25 bucks from seeed studio (The LoRa-E5 https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-E5-Dev-Kit-p-4868.html ). I purchased a couple of these about a week ago, and waiting for their arrival. As far as I can tell, most everything needed to get up and running is here. And now, $5 per month satellite access is available from swarm.

Here's an older (7 months ago) article on the swarm effort: https://www.semtech.com/company/press/se...-with-lora
As of today there are now over 100 satellites in Geo-stationary orbit, with 100 % coverage of Earth. Each satellite is about the size of a sandwich.

This, blows my mind and excites me to no end.

Most of the code I have seen is written in C. But with the computing power of this latest development board, I will attempt to get some python code up and running soon.

Some of the dev board features:

• Full GPIOs led out from the Lora-E5 STM32WLE5JC
  
• Global LoRaWAN® and LoRa frequency plan supported
  
• Long-distance transmission range to 10km (ideal value in open area)
  
• Mini and compact size, suitable for rapid testing and building small size prototype
  
• Convenient RESET and BOOT buttons on board
  
• world-first combo of LoRa RF and MCU chip into one single tiny chip and is FCC and CE certified, powered by ARM Cortex-M4 core and Semtech SX126X LoRa chip
  

Again, I'd love to see and hear from others who are currently experimenting, or are interested in the subject.