Connect your LoRaWAN, M2M and NBIoT devices to your own or public applications

Activate 5 devices for free on the Proximus LoRaWAN network in support to your academic or maker projects

LoRa4Makers is an easy entry door to the Proximus LoRaWAN network. Makers and academic users can conveniently develop their LoRaWAN prototypes and connect these to our national network at no charge. Access to the network is offered for a  period of 4 months, enough time to validate the development of your prototypes.

students startup

Enabling makers and academics to test the Proximus LoRaWAN network

With LoRa4Makers, you can activate up to 5 LoRaWAN devices on our national network at no cost. Just sign up and get started. LoRa4Makers will remain active for 4 months before being automatically disabled.

Onboard up to 5 devices

Use CloudEngine to retrieve your devices' data. With the [Cloudengine](https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/cloe/documentation "CloudEngine") Trial plan, coming at no charges, you will have enough script execution allowance to retrieve 288 messages per day for 5 devices

Retrieve your devices' data

LoRa4Makers allows you to

Simply subscribe to the [LoRa4Makers Plan](https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/lora4maker/price "LoRa4Makers plan") and you are ready to go.

Use the LoRa4makers microsite or our REST APIs to onboard your devices. Please note that LoRa4Makers only offer supports for ABP devices. Devices can be created as generic or "AllThingsTalk LoRaWAN RDK" for which we will provide payload decoding.

Susbcribe to [CloudEngine Trial plan](https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/cloe/price "CloudEngine Trial plan") to start retrieving your device and sensor data. The scripting capabilities of CloudEngine can be used to decode your device messages before forwarding the data to your application environment. 

How it works

Lora4Makers is the ideal tool to introduce the world of IoT to our Computer Science Technology students. In a few days, with a starter kit, they can design a complete IoT system.
The Lora4Makers platform allows them to easily connect their IoT sensors to the LoRaWan network, and, via the CloudEngine, to then transmit the data to their information visualization web application.

Testimonials

Do you need more information, a demo? Would you like us to help you get started, or even develop the complete solution for you? Don’t hesitate to contact us by filling in the form on our [contact us page](https://proximusapi.enco.io/contact-us "Contact us").

More information

Experimenting with your LoRaWAN kit

In most cases, an IoT Telco operator allows you access the data from your sensors by pushing this data to your application over HTTP. We have seen in previous articles that Proximus CloudEngine makes it possible to benefit from other integration capabilities, ranging from Microsoft Azure and SAP IoT Cloud down to various protocols such as sFTP and mail. To the already existing CloudEngine&#8217;s ability to use its own MQTT client to connect to your MQTT broker, we add now the ability for your MQTT client to connect to the CloudEngine&#8217;s broker.

Using the CloudEngine&#8217;s MQTT Broker simple and straightforward.
<h4>Step 1 &#8211; Define your client&#8217;s credentials</h4>
The first step is to create the credentials for your MQTT client. In the CloudEngine&#8217;s microsite, click on Settings then select &#8220;MQTT&#8221; in the Inbound Endpoint type list. Add a new configuration item and give it a name and password. Be careful and take a note of that password as it won&#8217;t be displayed once the item uis saved.
<figure id="attachment_4500" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4500" style="width: 598px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-4500 size-full" src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cloemqttsettings.png" alt="" width="598" height="296" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cloemqttsettings.png 598w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cloemqttsettings-300x148.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 598px) 85vw, 598px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-4500" class="wp-caption-text">CloudEngine MQTT settings</figcaption></figure>
<h4>Step 2 &#8211; Integrate our MQTT Broker module in your script</h4>
The second step is to integrate the MQTT Broker outbound module in your CloudEngine visual flow or script. In the creator of the MQTT Broker object, you include the reference to the credentials that we just created in the step above (&#8220;mqttbrotest&#8221; in the example below) and the MQTT topic to which the data will be published (&#8220;lorasensors/pxsmythings&#8221; in the example below). Topics can have several levels if needed, such as &#8220;mytopic/level2/level3&#8243;. You must also specify the <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33480730/understanding-mqtt-subscriber-qos" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">MQTT QoS</a> (0 for best effort delivery, 1 for at least one or 2 for exactly once).
<figure id="attachment_4503" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4503" style="width: 799px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-4503 size-full" src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cloescriptmqttbroker.png" alt="" width="799" height="535" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cloescriptmqttbroker.png 799w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cloescriptmqttbroker-300x201.png 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cloescriptmqttbroker-768x514.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-4503" class="wp-caption-text">CLOE script including the MQTT Broker module</figcaption></figure>
<h4>Step 3 &#8211; Connect your MQTT client to our broker</h4>
The final step is obviously to connect your MQTT client to our broker and start receiving your messages. The URL of our broker is simply &#8220;mqtt.enco.io&#8221;, using a secured connection on port 8883, or unsecured on port 1883. Credentials for your client have been defined as first step and the topic to which it should register must include the username, so in our example lorasensors/pxsmythings becomes mqttbrotest/lorasensors/pxsmythings.
Enjoy more secure &amp; reliable data transfer 
Now it&#8217;s your turn to leverage our new MQTT Broker and leverage the reliability, security and flexibility of the MQTT protocol !

How to retrieve your IoT data with a MQTT client ?

At Proximus, we want to make it easy and friction-less for LoRaWAN to support your new bright idea, whether you&#8217;re starting a new business from your home or need to include IoT networks in your school or academics project. LoRa4Makers is the answer to your needs.

<h4>What is your new big idea?</h4>
<blockquote>Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation. [Nick Camen]</blockquote>
It might be a connected hive or chicken coop, a way to measure underground rainwater storage, a new tracking device for UAV or the next pager system for crisis scenarios. Connected devices are everywhere, support more and more scenarios and these scenarios each comes with its own requirements for connectivity. You have narrowed down your needs to a long-range, low energy network such as LoRaWAN. At this point, all you want is to start building your first prototype and include connectivity in it.
<h4>Proximus LoRaWAN, a commercial network</h4>
For several years now, Proximus has extended its national network coverage to include the LoRaWAN protocol. We deployed LoRaWAN gateways across the territory and cover now most of the territory of Belgium &#8211; as you can see on our <a href="https://www.proximus.be/support/en/id_sfaqr_map_network/personal/support/internet/internet-on-the-go/surf-on-4g-or-3g/network-coverage-map.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">network coverage map</a>. All of these investments came at a cost and it is therefore not surprising to understand that access to our LoRaWAN network is a commercial offering. The access fees could be summarized as such:
<ul>
<li>a fixed, one-time charge activation fee</li>
<li>a very small fixed monthly fee per LoRaWAN device (about 1€) with a daily message allowance (288 messages/device/day)</li>
<li>additional optional fees (site survey services, etc)</li>
</ul>
This LoRaWAN commercial service from Proximus is known as &#8220;Proximus MyThings&#8221;. Should you already aim for a large roll-out and production use of our network, no need to read further &#8211; just reach out to our IoT colleagues at <a href="mailto:iot@proximus.com">iot@proximus.com</a> and ask to be recontacted about Proximus MyThings.
<h4>Proximus LoRa4Makers, temporary free access for makers and academics</h4>
As stated in the introduction, we understand that some people might just not need full-fledged commercial access to our LoRaWAN network. What they need is the ability to experiment low scale. With the launch of <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/lora4maker/overview" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Proximus LoRa4Makers</a> on the <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Proximus API Solutions</a> platform &#8211; formerly known as Proximus EnCo &#8211; we make it possible for anyone to activate up to 5 devices for free for 4 months on our national network. LoRa4Makers can be operated both from a user interface (which we call a microsite) and by REST API.
Let us list below a number of important points:
<ul>
<li>each device will be allowed 288 messages per day. Any further message above this limit will not be delivered</li>
<li>LoRa4Makers support ABP (Activation By Personalization). If you need OTAA (Over The Air Activation), you need Proximus MyThings</li>
<li>LoRa4Makers supports uplinks (messages sent by your device). If you need downlinks (messages to your device), you need Proximus MyThings</li>
<li>LoRa4Makers will not perform any payload decoding, except for AllThingsTalk LoRaWAN RDKs. You can however use the Proximus CloudEngine to develop your own payload decoder</li>
<li>Once the 4 months period has ended, messages from your devices will not be delivered anymore. You can always access your device list to get their details or delete them. Deleting them will allow you to reuse their devEUI on our network should you move your usage to Proximus MyThings for instance.</li>
<li>Accessing your device&#8217;s messages requires the use of <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/cloe/overview">Proximus CloudEngine</a>. The good news is that CloudEngine also offers a free usage tier with enough capacity to handle all messages coming from your 5 devices.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Getting started</h4>
It&#8217;s easy : if you don&#8217;t have an account on our API Solutions platform, just register for a new one. It&#8217;s free and all you need is a valid email address. Once this is done, register to the LoRa4Makers and to CloudEngine. Our documentation includes starting guides, step by step tutorials and script samples for CloudEngine. You&#8217;ll be up in no time !

LoRa4Makers : opening our LoRaWAN network to makers and academics

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