Community building

  • Connecting community members
  • Makers, Academia, Business, Municipality, and the Broader Public

Infrastructure

  • Assisting and conducting installs
  • Improving coverage and gateway redundancy

Open

  • Following Open Source principles
  • Achieving sustainability, Robustness, and trust

The Things Network

  • TTN, LoRaWAN, IoT
  • Furthering knowlegde
  • Providing resources

History

In 2018 a few local enthusaists made it their goal to reinvigorate the initial interest in The Things Network (TTN), improve the poor TTN coverage in the Western Cape, and create a non-profit as bridge between the community that has no legal status and the rest of the world that needs a legal entity to operate with.

Community

Our community consists of many individuals, organisations, and special interest groups. Enthusiasts, commercial businesses, academia, municipalities. We try to improve communication between community members to further a healthy and strong network. We help representing the South African community.

The Open Definition

In kinship to Open Network Infrastructure Asssociation, we also aim to establish the principles of open network infrastructure on the basis of The Open Definition in relation to network access, which can be summed up in the following statement: Free, open and reliable network infrastructure for anyone, anytime.

Coverage

Next to encouraging usage, we are also trying to improve coverage. We conduct our own installations, assist with installations, and are always looking for new community members who have resources they can contribute (high sites, backhaul infrastructure, donations, etc).

Events

Part of our activities is to organise get-togethers and workshops around The Things Network, LoRaWAN, and IoT. Next to organising events in dedicated meetup groups for Cape Town and Stellenbosch, we are happy to join and support your events.

Answers

Wherever questions arise, we try to provide meaningful answers and solutions. At the tip of Africa, things often differ from elsewhere in the world. 😊

Stay in touch with the community?

For the time being we're mostly in the TTN Slack Channel #westerncape

Join TTN Slack

From our blog

We’ll be trying to regularly publish blog posts about our activities and locally relevant topics.

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The Curious Use Case of Load Shedding

By Reuben Honigwachs on March 20, 2019

South Africa is facing a power crisis for a very long time now. This is compensated for by load shedding, where the energy provider Eskom switches off sectors of the national grid. In March 2019 we have seen an extended period of Stage 4 whereby an area will be without power for three periods of 2.5 hrs per day. This has a detrimental impact on daily life and citizen’s basic needs.

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High Site Green Point

on September 12, 2018

In the beginning of July already, Matt Feinstein and JP Meijers cooperated and successfully installed another gateway in Greenpoint, Cape Town. We thank you! Great effort! With its unique position the gateway covers areas previously shielded by Signal Hill. From the radar plot it also becomes apparent that it enables many opportunities in nautical sciences and marine biology: Certainly with room for improvement, now we have good coverage over Table Bay and False Bay.

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High Site UCT

on June 30, 2018

With great pride we announce to have completed the install of a The Things Network (TTN) gateway on the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT). Special thanks hereby goes out to Dr. David Johnson, who next to granting us this great opportunity, also lead the install and provides patronage for the gateway. Thanks also goes out to Michael Graaf and Eric Nitschke for assisting. Eric has provided some amazing photos under CC BY-NC-SA which are available on Flickr.

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