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!