Shipping Hardware Fast: Solar LoRa Vehicle

I have a short rule when someone asks if a piece of kit is field ready: if you can ship it on a Tuesday and the crew has it running by Friday, it is. If it takes three weeks of custom wiring, drivers, and sticky notes, then it is not. Over the last year I helped stand up a few rapid-deploy gateway vehicles for volunteer teams and small agencies. The best designs have three traits in common: they are modular, practical, and stupid-easy to set up.

This is a hands-on, opinionated playbook for building a solar LoRa vehicle that you can assemble in a day, test in a weekend, and ship in a crate. I write this from experience hiding in drizzle on a roadside, swapping antennas, and swapping fried fuses under a headlamp. If you want to move hardware fast, design for the field, not for the spec sheet.

Design goals

Start with what matters in the real world.

1. Deployable in 30 minutes by one person.
2. Operate off-grid for at least 48 hours under typical use.
3. Survive rain, dust, and a few drops.
4. Fit into a single padded crate for easy shipping.
5. Use common, replaceable parts so spares are cheap.

If your design meets these goals, your ops team will love you. If it does not, they will invent workarounds that become permanent and messy.

Core components

Here is the practical parts list I use when I need to ship a capable gateway fast.

• Vehicle rack or magnetic mount plate, rated for vibration.
• LoRa gateway module with USB or Ethernet backhaul port. Pick a unit that supports an external 9 to 24 V input.
• Single-board computer, like a Raspberry Pi or equivalent, for gateway management and optional local applications.
• Solar panel, 60 to 120 W, with IP65 junction box. Size depends on daily draw and local irradiance.
• Charge controller with MPPT. Prefer one with configurable battery chemistry profiles.
• 12 V lithium battery pack sized for 48 hours of typical draw, plus a safety margin. Include BMS and fuse.
• Roof mast, 1 to 2 meters, collapsible for shipping. Use quick-release mounts.
• Antennas: one omni for general coverage and one small yagi for directed links. Quick connectors like N-type male/female make swaps easy.
• Weatherproof enclosure for electronics with cable glands and internal mounting plate.
• Small toolkit: short coax, T-connectors, dielectric grease, spare fuses, zip ties.
• Documentation packet printed and on a USB stick: network credentials, wiring diagram, recovery instructions.

A note on vendors. I used a few SpecFive Voyager units during trials as vehicle gateway references. They behaved well in splash tests and their magnetic mount made field mounting painless. That is not an ad. It is field data. If a vendor provides a rugged, drop-in gateway, treat it as one more module in your system. The whole point of fast shipping is modularity, not vendor lock-in.

Build and assembly checklist

I prototype on the bench, then assemble the production crate. Here is the sequence I follow.

1. Mount the gateway and SBC on the internal plate, secure with lock washers.
2. Wire the MPPT output to the battery BMS and run a fused feed to the electronics. Label every wire.
3. Install the antenna mast and verify connectors mates cleanly. Apply a thin film of dielectric grease to outdoor connectors.
4. Load the OS image, configure the gateway service, and bake common scripts for logging and remote health checks.
5. Run a 4-hour soak test with the unit under the expected load profile. Log voltage, CPU temp, and packet counts.
6. If the soak test passes, shutdown and pack with shock-absorbing foam and a clear build sheet.

The build sheet deserves its own page. Include photos of wire runs, serial numbers, and a short troubleshooting tree that leads a tech to the right fuse, cable, or log file.

Packaging and shipping considerations

If you want gear to arrive functional, think like a shipper and a mechanic at once.

• Use a double-wall crate or a reusable flight case with internal foam cutouts. Foam should cradle the mast sections separately to avoid bending.
• Keep sensitive electronics together and batteries in a separate, labeled bag with clear instructions for handlers. Follow lithium battery shipping regulations for your carrier.
• Tape a laminated quick-start sheet to the inside lid so the first technician on site can get to work without digging through the manual.
• Include a tiny, field-proof parts kit: N-type male to SMA adapters, a meter, spare fuses, and a tiny screwdriver set.

I once had a crate delayed 48 hours. The crate arrived with a mast section bent. Because we included a spare mast tube and the right connectors, the team had the gateway upright within an hour.

Remote provisioning and health checks

Ship the device pre-provisioned as much as your security policy allows. At a minimum, automate these tasks.

• A startup script that posts a heartbeat to a known endpoint within 5 minutes of boot.
• A log rotation and upload process limited to health metrics. Avoid shipping raw pcap or bulk telemetry without authorization.
• An automatic fallback that opens a reverse SSH tunnel when allowed so a remote engineer can peek at the device without complex VPN routing.

Make remote updates staged and reversible. If you push a new image, the device should keep the old partition for one boot cycle so you can roll back remotely.

Field checklist for first run

Train the receiving team on a 6-item checklist.

1. Mount the mast and verify physical integrity.
2. Connect solar and confirm the MPPT reports charging.
3. Verify battery voltage and BMS state.
4. Power the gateway, confirm heartbeat to the control plane.
5. Check antenna orientation. A quick 30-second walk test with two handheld nodes is more useful than ten minutes staring at logs.
6. Record the device serial and the initial RSSI numbers.

If the heartbeat does not appear on the control panel within 10 minutes, follow the troubleshooting tree on the laminated sheet. If that fails, call the ops number. Keep the troubleshooting team contact list updated in the crate.

Fast QA: what to test before you seal the crate

Before you ship, run these quick tests. They take under an hour.

• Power failure test. Kill vehicle power and confirm battery supplies the gateway for 15 minutes.
• Solar test. Simulate low light and confirm the MPPT reports limited charge without oscillation.
• Network test. Send a test packet to the cloud ingest and confirm receipt.
• Thermal test. Place the enclosure in a 40 degree Celsius environment for 30 minutes and monitor CPU and gateway temps.

These tests find the stupid failures that ruin field days.

Lessons learned and final notes

If you design for speed, you will iterate a few cheap times, not one expensive time. Keep spare parts cheap and shipping-friendly. Document the hell out of the build and the failure modes you saw. Treat the receiving team as your QA partner and give them the few tools that let them fix simple problems fast.

Shipping hardware fast is not about corner cutting. It is about good design, repeatable processes, and a small number of robust choices. If your crate contains a documented, tested, modular gateway that survives rain, vibration, and a confused operator, you have succeeded. If you can ship it on a Tuesday and the team is online by Friday, you have built for the real world.

If you want, I will share my build sheet, parts list, and the exact health-check scripts I use in the field. It will save you at least one night on the roadside.