LoRaWAN is an industrial wireless protocol that sends tiny messages over kilometers on a battery that lasts years. This article introduces the protocol, its benefits, AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN as a managed LoRa Network Server, and the architecture I built to monitor water, gas and electricity at home for almost zero cloud cost.
Aurora DSQL has no database passwords, only short-lived IAM tokens, while Grafana expects a static PostgreSQL password. This article shows how a scheduled Lambda refreshes the token through the Grafana API, with a read-only user and least privilege access to keep the bill under control.
Registering LoRaWAN sensors in AWS IoT Core with CDK requires a custom resource to avoid losing the device session on stack updates. This article explains why, how to store secrets in SSM Parameter Store, and what you gain by managing sensors as code.
The cdk.out folder can balloon to 15GB+ in large CDK monorepos. Instead of wiping it entirely, a small cleanup script removes only unused assets — keeping deploys fast while reclaiming disk space.
The Browan Femto Lite (now MerryIoT Hub) is an affordable LoRaWAN gateway that connects to AWS IoT Core via Basic Station mode. This guide covers the two main steps — registering the gateway with the right EUID and uploading the CUPS certificate — including the key gotchas that trip people up.
