Remote sensor network question/brainstorming

Hi,

I spent a day of googling for a solution of unconvinience, that I was expecting to be more common. Unfortunately, I just can’t find it…

I have a house in a remote village runing HA with hundreds of zigbee, esphome, ble devices.

I have also an apiary 3 kilometers away. I want to have some battery powered sensor in several beehives. And I want to receive and log them in my Home Assistant instance in the house. I want to this as cheap as possible. Also software should be available.

Some facts. There is no internet, wifi, mobile network coverage in the apiary. There is no direct line of sight, though it is relative flat terrain. There is a highway in between but still not operational. I don’t need real time information. Just some temperature and weight measurements once an hour of several hives (up to 20)

Since it is low volume of data, up to 100 bytes an hour, I was thinking I can submit it over LoRa to the house.
But I have found only “LoRa sensors”… do I really have to put 20 lora transmitters in every hive, right next to each other?? It does not sound practical… plus, i might need to put one high gain antena high over the shack (it is actually a steel cargo container)

I feel a better approach is to collect the mesurements over ble, zigbee, espnow or mysensors and resubmit them over LoRa to the house. The sensors should be really low power as batteries should last months, if not years. The LoRa “gateway” can be powered by AC or solar panel + battery

So the setup I imagine can be as follows:
sensor->BLE->apiary gateway->LoRa->house gateway->wifi/ethernet-> HA
I am quite sure data should be in MQTT format at some point, but not sure where. Mysensors have the smallest format, bthome have a bit larger payload.

Do you have any ideas how this can be done? Any recommendations for components, modules and software or available solutions are welcome.

Thanks!

Did you consider “plain” 3G/4G?
I’m pretty sure lorawan would do, but you are less likely to get support with that technology.

Hi,

It is too expensive for the task. There are monthly fees. Plus, there is no network coverage there.

Ok. If you have no coverage, obviously not an option, but re costs, a small prepaid sim would surely do and would surely be cheaper than a couple lora gateways…

From a quick look, it seems that lorawan wifi gateway are pretty common.
I’d probably add an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy to the mix to do “BLE->proxy->wifi”, so that the gateway is not concerned with BLE.

Not necessarily. For example we got ourselfs some pre-paid sim cards which have 500MB traffic included and are valid for 120 months for only 10 bucks a piece. But sure, depends totally on your region and what the market is offering. In some countries you can even get free sim cards with free data packages in exchange for your data :arrows_counterclockwise:

That would be only around 1MB in 10 years… :pinching_hand:

Or NB-IoT if it is available in your region! :signal_strength:

I live in Bulgaria. None of the 3 operators have publicly available IoT access to their networks. Standard LTE data plans are per month are as cheap as single ESP-Lora board.
I am going to try OpenMQTTGateway with some cheap Heltec or LILYGO boards from Aliexpress.

The thing is, I am still not sure what else I will need to get the data from a sensor to HA. All I have for now is:
HA - MQTT over WIFI - OMG - LORA - OMG - ? MQTT over WIFI ? - battery powered sensors
I am starting to think I will need local hotspot and possibly local MQTT broker and some ESPHome sensors with deep sleep like this one: