LPWAN and LowRa for outdoor sensors

Hardware
1

Hi all, one of my interests is in environmental motoring outside of the home (e.g. in garden). Has anyone investigated one of the the power - long range protocols, and integrated them into HA? These articlee provides a little background

2

Mysensors.org has some projects using LoRa radios.

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3

Have a look at TTN, The Things Network. It is an open worldwide lora network that uses MQTT. You can subscribe to the service and collect the data from your lora node/sensor. I didn’t test it yet, but integration with HA looks easy and straightforward. You probably need to decode the payload, as it is 64base encoded.
Cheers!

PS. I’m using lora with TTN and have build several sensors based on arduino. At the moment I just collect the data of the nodes via the MQTT broker TTN operates (everything is free), but I’m planning to use HA when I have some time to spare. Lora can be used not only for your garden. In open field tests have shown radio ranges (weather balloons) of over 100 km. Normally it will be in the range upto 2 (city) to 16 (line of sight) km.
A well designed lora node will operate a long time (year) on one battery. As e.g. the Netherlands has many gateways spread over the country, it is e.g. ideal to track your stuff (bike, car, goods).

4

Thanks I will check it out! :slight_smile:

5

Hi @robmarkcole I’m currently testing a Sigfox dev kit sensor at the moment.

I’ve got it running and all hooked up, and now I need to configure the Sigfox backend to push data into an HA sensor.

I tried setting up a template sensor in HASS, but every time I write to it via API (see test code below), the sensor calls my new value as old.state and the default value in the sensor definition as new.state.

The wash up is that yes I can write to a template sensor, but it reverts to the hard coded state value in the sensor definition.

Here’s the sensor definition;

  - platform: template
    sensors:
      sigfox_temp:
        value_template: 
        friendly_name: 'Sigfox Temperature'
        unit_of_measurement: 'degrees'
      sigfox_humidity:
        value_template: 
        friendly_name: 'Sigfox Humidity'
        unit_of_measurement: 'percent'

Here’s the curl command I’m using to push date to the API;

curl -X POST -H "x-ha-access: PASSWORD" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{"state": "25", "attributes": {"unit_of_measurement": "Degrees"}}' \
     https://hass.jjpeet.com:8123/api/states/sensor.sigfox_temp

When I run that curl command, here’s the log file;

2017-06-20 18:07:46 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.http] Serving /api/states/sensor.sigfox_temp to 192.168.0.54 (auth: True)
2017-06-20 18:07:46 INFO (MainThread) [homeassistant.core] Bus:Handling <Event state_changed[L]: new_state=<state sensor.sigfox_temp=25; unit_of_measurement=Degrees, testAttribute=test @ 2017-06-20T18:07:46.590577+10:00>, entity_id=sensor.sigfox_temp, old_state=None>

Does anyone have any thoughts? Am I just using the wrong sensor - how might I setup a dummy sensor which can take data from the Sigfox backend via API?

Thx
James

6

HI James
Unfortunately as yet I have no hands on experience with Sigfox I’m afraid. Hopefully someone else will chime in.
However you could try MQTT.
Cheers

7

@jjpeet how is your Sigfox integration coming along?

8

Hi @robmarkcole it’s running well.
I ended up pushing the data from the Sigfox backend to IFTT and then from IFTT over to HA.
Let me know if you want the detail and I’ll put it together…
JP

9

Interesting why that way rather than through their rest API?

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