Microchip LoRaWAN Development Utility on Ubuntu

Having just wasted a few hours on getting this Java software running on Linux I am documenting this for future reference and hopefully saving other LoRa / TTN folks some time.

Prerequisites

Install a Java JDK + JavaFX. This should work with the default OpenJDK 8 or 9 which comes as part of the Ubuntu repositories. I ended up installing Oracle JDK 8 as well as I thought the error might be related to OpenJDK.

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jre-headless openjfx

Download & install utility

Download location:
LoRa® Technology Evaluation Kit

cd ~/Downloads/
chmod +x LoRaSuite-linux-1.0.run
./LoRaSuite-linux-1.0.run

Fix User Preferences

This step is required for the Utility to run. Unfortunately, this is documented NOWHERE…

Change the following files to include the FilePath entry. The map is empty by default.

• /home/USERID/.java/.userPrefs/dfu/prefs.xml
• /home/USERID/.java/.userPrefs/fed/prefs.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE map SYSTEM "http://java.sun.com/dtd/preferences.dtd">
<map MAP_XML_VERSION="1.0">
  <entry key="FilePath" value="/home/USERID/"/>
</map>

If you chose the default install location you can now start the utility

java -jar ~/Microchip/LoRaSuite/Applications/LoRaDevUtility/LoRaDevUtility.jar

A big thank you goes to The Things Network user JBI – who provided this answer in a TTN forum post.

No thanks to Microchip as their forum and firmware release policy is a bit of a shocker. There are several reports of such problems in the forum with no answers. Unfortunately, this seems to be no exception with electronics manufacturers (Hello Kerlink!).