Brightix, a São Paulo company that designs and makes LED modules, drivers and controls, is preparing a Crowd Supply campaign for LoraReach: a carrier board for building your own LoRaWAN gateway around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 or a pin-compatible module. Hackster.io wrote about it on 19 October 2026. The Crowd Supply page says the project is "launching soon" and takes sign-ups for updates. There is no price or launch date yet.
What is on the board
LoraReach has two mini-PCIe slots. One takes an SPI LoRaWAN concentrator, the radio part of the gateway. The other is for an optional 4G/LTE modem, with a SIM card slot next to it, so the gateway can get online where there is no cable. There is also Gigabit Ethernet, a microSD slot and Wi-Fi, if the compute module has it. A built-in GPS receiver with a patch antenna provides the location and precise timing.
The power supply is part of the board and takes 120-240 V AC straight from the mains. Brightix gives typical consumption as under 10 W. The board measures 146 × 118 × 50 mm and weighs 300 g.
The compute module, concentrator, 4G modem and microSD card are not included, so the price of the board alone will not be the price of a working gateway.
Ordinary Linux instead of a closed appliance
The point of the project is openness. Commercial gateways usually come with fixed firmware, and Brightix wants a board you can open up and adapt. LoraReach boots standard Linux distributions for the CM4 and runs Semtech's official packet forwarder, so it should work with The Things Network, Loriot, ChirpStack and other LoRaWAN network servers. You can run your own services alongside it, for example to log raw packets locally or for diagnostics. The schematics and bill of materials are open source.
Where Home Assistant comes in
A gateway only passes radio packets on to a network server. Home Assistant has had a base lorawan integration in its development branch since 14 October, and in that design integrations connect to network servers, not to gateways. The ChirpStack integration, which would connect ChirpStack tenants and selected applications, was still waiting for review on 19 October. Until it is merged, Home Assistant has no native way to read devices from a ChirpStack server, whichever gateway feeds it.