Why would you suggest LORA over 433mhz?
Allright, I’ll give LORA a shot then.
Yep, those are the probes that I have, so I will try this.
I also have 2 TTGO LORA boards (the ones outlined in the OMG instructions), while I was able to flash the board with the OMG firmware, serial output showed that the board was rebooting every few seconds or so (I don’t remember exactly, i’ll try again when i’m back in front of my computer). I was hoping that I could make one the “gateway”, the other one the “sender” that would be attached to a bunch of (capacitive) wired soil sensors. I even looked at the i2c sensor offered by adafruit (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4026) alas it seems only 2 can be on one bus (not enough addresses it seems).
Problem is I have no idea how to get data from a sensor, to a board that can send the data via LORA to the gateway. So i’m in over my head, but i like tinkering, so let me know if you’ve got some pointers and i’ll give it a go!
If you compare 2 nodes, one with 433mhz basic protocol and one with lora modulation with the same power you will get a far better range with Lora. By design lora is a LPWAN technology (low power wide area network)
Strange, we can dig into that if needed
Here is the principle:
Lora node with moisture sensor (moteino, ultra mini pro or other low power board)
|| lora
V LoratoMQTT gateway based on ESP32 and connected by wifi
|| wifi - mqtt
V Home Assistant
The moteino will be loaded with an arduino program like this one for example
Looks like Lora is definitely the way to go then.
Yeah I had a really hard time getting OMG working, but it looks like it’s finally connected and stable.
However, I’m not getting the 25m that you’re able to get going to do more tests…
Note that in the architecture proposed before, the esp32 board is used as a gateway with continuous power. For the nodes the envisaged solution is a moteino or equivalent on a battery (not an esp32 board)
The TTGO I am using, running openmqttgateway (just BT and LoRa), was powered by an 18650 (one of those phone charger bricks, 3350 mAh) and the device remained up for about 8 hrs.
I’m not at my setup so this is from memory, but I’m happy to get you more granular metrics if you’d like.
First step would be to test with 2 esp32 lora board that you can send and receive.
See below : https://docs.openmqttgateway.com/use/lora.html
Once done you can upload OMG to the receiver one, configured as a lora gateway. Check that you receive now the msgs at the MQTT broker level.
If yes you can go further and upload the program example included with this sensor. Check before that all the Lora parameters matches.
If it is working. Congratulation. If not you can give more details here.
So I’ve gotten OMG working for some time now on a lora capable heltec mcu with BLE devices, so I think I’m good there. I guess I can test the sender sketch in the other board to ensure I can reciever lora.
Where I do need help for sure is how to get data from a sensor and send it as mqtt via lora. Hopefully getting the soil probe to do that won’t be too hard!
You need to test the program provided as an example with the sensor first and see if the data are received properly.
Regarding MQTT via LORA, the gateway LORAtoMQTT will deal with this, and you are going to verify that this is working prior to this step.
going to do more tests…