I have been using LoRaWAN technology for soil monitoring on the farm. LoRaWAN has 2 huge advantages over WIFI. Lot bigger coverage or range and lot less battery power needed. Just an example we are talking about kms instead of a few 100 meters, or year long battery life instead of 15 days or 1 month. LoRaWAN needs a gateway but one can get cheap from Aliexpress. Anyways LoRaWAN is million times better for large farms or large areas. Propagates much better thru walls too.
The LoRaWAN sensor I am using is from here https://tinovi.com/tinovi-shop/
The LoRaWAN gateway is the classic Aliexpress RAK2245 Pi HAT
I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 with the RAK2245 Pi HAT.
Attention: RAK HAT will be pretty hot, so i ordered alu heatsink to it. Kind of a must.
I bought an external LoRaWAN omnidirectional antenna from Mikrotik.
To setup LoRaWAN with The Things Network, i used just some youtube tutorials.
Home Assistant integration info is here: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/thethingsnetwork/
The actual code in home assistant is the following for the above sensor:
sensor:
- platform: thethingsnetwork
device_id: soilsensor
values:
airHum: “%”
airPres: mBar
airTemp: “\u00b0C”
bat: “%”
devid: “”
e25: x
ec: “\u0025”
leak: l
lux: lux
raw: r
temp: “\u00b0C”
time: T
valv: o
vwc: n
thethingsnetwork:
app_id: gardensoilsensor
access_key: ttn-account-v2._-Q-PsomethingyoucanfindonyourTTNaccount
First you need to make the sensor readings available on The Things Network, you need to use a decoder code to decode the values and use the 7 day free data storage for the data.
Decode function can be dowloaded from tinovi.com
I must say it works great, More expensive than the WIFI sensors but remember its long range and long battery life.
