Skip to main content

FIBER Lite Concentrator Never Shows a Gateway ID

Symptom: on FIBER Lite (SPI/RAK2287), the concentrator's own service logs never print a Gateway ID, the ChirpStack gateway page never shows a "Last seen at" timestamp, and no join-request ever reaches ChirpStack — even though the LoRaWAN end-device is powered on and in range.

danger

This hardware path is not yet verified on real hardware (see Install ChirpStack Concentratord) — the checks below are starting points based on how the SPI/RAK2287 path is documented to work, not a confirmed fix. Exact service and binary names depend on whatever RAKwireless's own SX1302 HAL installer sets up on your system; adjust the commands below to match what it actually installed.

Work through these in order:

  1. Confirm SPI is enabled and the HAT is electrically seated — the single most common cause of "nothing at all" on any SPI peripheral:

    grep spi /boot/firmware/config.txt   # expect: dtparam=spi=on (uncommented)
    ls /dev/spidev*                       # expect: at least one device

    If dtparam=spi=on is missing or commented out, add/uncomment it and reboot. If /dev/spidev* still shows nothing after that, the RAK2287 HAT isn't making contact with the Pi 5's GPIO header — reseat it and check for bent pins before going further.

  2. Confirm RAKwireless's own installer actually finished, rather than silently failing partway. The generic USB ChirpStack Concentratord configuration used on FIBER (CM4) does not work here — this path needs RAKwireless's SX1302 HAL installer, which sets up the SPI device path and GPIO reset-pin handling the RAK2287 needs. Re-run it and read its output in full rather than assuming it succeeded.

  3. Check whatever service the installer created is actually running, and read its logs from the very start of the process — the real failure (SPI open error, wrong device path, chip ID mismatch) shows up in the first few lines, before a crash loop just repeats the same symptom over and over.

If none of this resolves it, that's a genuinely useful data point — please report exactly what you tried, the RAK2287 installer version, and the log output back to HARDWARIO so this page (and the underlying procedure) can be corrected against real hardware.