Become a leader in the IoT community!
New DevHeads get a 320-point leaderboard boost when joining the DevHeads IoT Integration Community. In addition to learning and advising, active community leaders are rewarded with community recognition and free tech stuff. Start your Legendary Collaboration now!
Hi Camila, I have quite a lot of application experience with LoRaWAN as well as some other LPWA sensor technologies. Happy to discuss, can you share more info about your application? Indoor, outdoor? Public or private network server? Range needed, number of sensors, how frequently they’ll transmit data, etc?
Hiii Mike , yes l’m working on an outdoor project with 5 sensors. They need to send data every 20 minutes, and I’m aiming for a range of 300 meters. I’m using a private network server. Can you share some basic setup tips and things I should watch out for as a beginner in this field?
That’s a great application for LoRaWAN, should have no coverage problems with a single gateway, as long as there aren’t severe obstructions. An additional architectural decision to make is whether to host your LoRaWAN Network Server (LNS) on the gateway itself (some gateway mfg’s offer this, not all), or remote/cloud. Managing your own LNS (Chirpstack, etc) is more effort than most realize so I’d consider a commercial LNS provider. The other consideration is that you’ll have to decode the sensor payload once you receive it at the application level (LW doesn’t define a standard sensor payload). Your sensor vendor(s) will be able to provide the info for that.
@bencos18 not sure i’d call your use case a low-power IoT sensor network but thought you might have something to add here
Haven’t done much testing yet but my final system is definitely to try and get it going at some point
I’ll have a look tomorrow though as it’s midnight rn haha
Could look into the things network also
Only thing is that would make the gateway be public in that it repeats everyone’s messages if they are in range also
Final system is definitely going to be something I want to get as lower power as possible though tbh
Hi Ben – its quite hard to make the LoRaWAN gateway very low power since it’s listening for asynch sensor data, and they’re most all on linux which is difficult to make work in a very fast “wake” cycle. The sensors themselves are very power efficient.
Yep
Meant the sensors not the gateway
Though you definitely want to get the antenna as high as you can
That way you don’t have as many obstacles in the way
Lora is pretty much line of sight
I put my antenna setup in the loft for example
The gateway would definitely be a pain to make it be lower power
I have it running off a pi so it’s not too bad at least
CONTRIBUTE TO THIS THREAD