P-NUCLEO_LRWAN3 is obsolete?

[gregoriB]

I feel duped right now.  I bought the P-NUCLEO-LRWAN3 kit yesterday from st.com directly as my starting point into embedded stuff. Today I installed CubeIDE and went to generate a new project for the NUCLEO-F746ZG included in the kit, and I get a message telling me the board is obsolete. The kit says the marketing status is "active", but when I look up the NUCLEO-F746ZG directly, sure enough it says it's obsolete and I should use the NUCLEO-F756ZG instead.

Why is this package marked as active and still in circulation? I feel this is just a way to sell obsolete boards to people don't know any better. Yeah I should have looked up the each board in the kit individually before buying, but I guess I was just burned out from researching all these different boards and I decided to trust that the kit is legit.

edit: Maybe the wrong board is listed in the kit description?  I hope that's the case.  It's due to arrive on Monday, so I guess I'll see then.

[Andrew Neil]

Indeed, it does still say "active":

But the gateway looks very much the same as the one in  P-NUCLEO-LRWAN2 - which definitely is NRND:

[Tesla DeLorean · Accepted solution]

The lack of firmware / support for the LRWAN_GS_LF1 will be much more consequential..

The F746 vs F756 are basically the same part, the latter with HASH/CRYP functionality enabled. Both are relatively old at this point, but the hardware is still solid and the examples will continue to work.

If you're building your own platform you can make whatever choices you need to moving forward.

[gregoriB]

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@Tesla DeLorean wrote:

The lack of firmware / support for the LRWAN_GS_LF1 will be much more consequential..

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ugh this is the type of thing I was hoping to avoid by getting a curated kit...

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@Tesla DeLorean wrote:

The F746 vs F756 are basically the same part, the latter with HASH/CRYP functionality enabled. Both are relatively old at this point, but the hardware is still solid and the examples will continue to work.

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Yeah I mean I'm fine with using this board if that's the only difference, but I don't think this kit should have an obsolete board in it at all.  They don't even sell that board by itself anymore.  They probably clearanced it all out.

I'll probably end up contacting customer support if this kit is a lemon.  Between having a wireless board with no firmware support and an obsolete board, it seems like they should make a kit v4 with no issues.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Perhaps check with RisingHF  https://github.com/risinghf

This is one of the ideas that's didn't really take off. I think most went in the RPi / Embedded Linux direction for the SX130x hub / concentrator concept.

Basically multiple concurrent receiver channels on different frequency/settings.

[gregoriB]

This is one of the ideas that's didn't really take off. I think most went in the RPi / Embedded Linux direction for the SX130x hub / concentrator concept.

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Yeah that's understandable.  In my head it made sense to have a middleman unit that receives the signals for what I'm trying to build, which is a smart homestead that would have sensors using LoRa, and regular wifi for other things(like cameras).

It seems like ST no longer offers any kind of wifi module?  I guess I'll be getting an ES8266 or something else cheap for the middleman to communicate with the cameras and server for now.

At this point I'm so ready to start development with the LORA-3 kit I ordered and not spend a bunch more time researching purchases 🫤