ChirpStack Rock Pi 4B+ + Nebra LoRa HAT (GL5712-UX / SX1301) working on Armbian Trixie — setup script + full writeup

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Title: Rock Pi 4B+ + Nebra LoRa HAT (GL5712-UX / SX1301) working on Armbian Trixie — setup script + full writeup

After several weeks of debugging I have a fully working ChirpStack v4 gateway running on a Rock Pi 4B+ with a Nebra Indoor LoRa HAT. I've written it up and published a setup script because there was almost nothing documented for this exact hardware combination.

The two problems that took the most time:

  1. The Armbian SPI overlay system silently ignores overlays on current Trixie builds for the Rock Pi 4B+. The script uses the rk3399-spi-spidev overlay which actually works, and falls back to direct DTB editing if needed.

  2. The GL5712-UX concentrator module (found in older Nebra HATs) has a hardware inverter on the NRESET line. HIGH = chip in reset, LOW = chip running. This is the opposite of the standard SX1301 reference design. If anything holds NRESET HIGH — including a GPIO daemon — the chip never comes out of reset and SPI returns 0x00 for everything. The fix is to let chirpstack-concentratord own NRESET exclusively via sx1301_reset_chip/sx1301_reset_pin in the TOML, and only hold POWER_EN in the systemd service.

The repo covers both GL5712-UX (SX1301) and RAK2287 (SX1302) modules with auto-detection.

GitHub: https://github.com/mowaxuk/chirpstack-nebra-rockpi-Mowax

Hope this saves someone else the same pain. Happy to answer questions.

Thanks for sharing (I have fixed the github url)!

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