Remote Sensing with Core2 (UIFlow) via LORA Point-to-point
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Could you give me some insights about which LORA radio model to choose for point-to-point communication, at 3 km in a remote sensing application. There is no LORAWan gateway network available. I’m using two M2 Core2 at the endpoints. Would prefer to implement a MQTT data transfer under a Blockly MicroPython function.
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Interesting question. M5Stack provides P2P LoRa example along with their documents. My suggestion is to make a proof of principle what you need. Then try the max achievable distance. Mqtt is another challenge but also many examples on GitHub.
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No LoRa Gateway available ?
Check if you have coverage from the Helium Network ? You get some Data Credits (DC) for free for testing. 1'000'000 Data Credits will cost you $10 and will last for years. The Helium Network allows you transferring you data by MTTQ or Https , the same as with the TTN network. You can check if you have coverage in your area by chking the Helium map:
https://explorer.helium.com/ (There are still 350'0'00 Helium Gateways active thanks to all the guys trying to get "zero income" covering their expenses for the gateway) . -
The problem with Lora over that distance is that you may need a Line of sight between the Sensor and the receiver node.
You may be better off using a cell unit that has a built in mobile phone parts to do the communication but that has it own issues in that it will needs to be able to get a cell signal.If using Lora, you will need to use the UART Units with the core 2, I have external trials fitted to mine because even a few hundred meters between my office and the greenhouse is nouse to block the signal.
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Indeed, if you have cell phone coverage, you could easily use the sim7080 or sim7800 modules to send MQTT data. Works great and small enclosures required ( even solar powered is achievable).
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@crami25 My sensor locations are out in the bush, where no cell signal, nor LoraWan gateway is available. LORA 9xx might be able to connect
env. data aquisition, or do emergency signal calls. -
I have been testing LoRa with Meshtastic lately using ESP32 boards (Heltec and Lilygo) and am looking to try now with M5. Built into the platform is support for environment sensors, other may need a bit of work to add (which is what I am hoping to do). I have a test mesh of 6 nodes, and only 1 is connected to my WiFi. Each node sends telemetry data with is read by the one (on WiFi) which in turns sens the message to an MQTT server. I then use Node-Red to process and push write the data into MongoDB.
LoRaWAN uses LoRa to communicate with the gateway, so as long as it is reachable by the sensor you should be able to get your data.
The LoRaWAN gateway does the bit of connecting your sensors to the cloud/network where you can access them.
HTH.
