Help
Plain answers about setting up RING, the sensors, and this site.
Still stuck?
Questions about a particular gateway or sensor are welcome. Write to [email protected] or [email protected].
Contact the teamA way to send small sensor readings a long way on very little power. Sensors talk by radio to a gateway, often from more than a mile away in open fields, and the gateway passes their readings to a server over the internet or a private network.
It suits farms and research plots because one gateway can cover a lot of ground, and the sensors don’t each need a cellular plan.
Not much. RING tells you which command to run, which computer to run it on, and what you should see afterwards. You will open a terminal and paste commands, so it helps to be comfortable doing that, but you don’t need to write configuration files or know Docker.
A Linux server you can reach over SSH: a mini-PC on site or a virtual machine in the cloud. We test on Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS on 64-bit x86, with Docker Engine and the Compose plugin.
For the field, a gateway that supports LoRa Basics Station on US915, and your sensors’ registration details from the manufacturer (DevEUI, JoinEUI, and AppKey). You can finish the server setup before the hardware arrives.
ChirpStack, the LoRaWAN network server; the ChirpStack Gateway Bridge, where Basics Station gateways connect; the Mosquitto MQTT broker; and PostgreSQL and Redis for storage. They run as Docker containers with pinned versions, configured for the US915 frequency plan (sub-band 2). The package also includes preflight, install, and status scripts.
No. This website never connects to your server. It builds the installation package in your browser and shows you the commands to run yourself, one step at a time. Automated remote installation is still being developed.
No. You type passwords only into your own terminal. RING never asks for SSH keys, server passwords, or your sensors’ keys, and it never stores them.
From RING’s own deployment at Purdue. Two soil sensors report about every 20 minutes through a LoRaWAN gateway to ChirpStack, and a small service stores each reading. The Sensors page shows only public measurements, never device identifiers or raw payloads.
No. The Weather page uses Open-Meteo’s forecast models for the location you choose. It is kept separate from the sensor data: it isn’t combined with it, and it isn’t used to give advice.
Very little, and only in your browser. Your setup answers and progress are kept in the current browser tab and are gone when you close it. Passwords, key contents, and pasted terminal output are never stored.
Your temperature unit and weather location are remembered in this browser. After your first visit, the browser also keeps a small page to show if you open the site without a connection. There are no accounts and no analytics. Fonts load from Google Fonts and weather comes from Open-Meteo, so those services receive ordinary requests from your browser.
RING is a research prototype from Purdue University’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, shared for research and education. Read each step before you run it on your own equipment, and keep your own backups. Sensor readings, screening ranges, and weather are for information, not agronomic advice. If you would like to use RING in your own work, contact the team.
AgBridge was a separate summer initiative. It isn’t RING’s sponsor or funding source, and is mentioned here only as related history.