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by alexose 825 days ago
LoRa is really a fantastic tool for outdoor sensing.

I built a (free! open source! 3d printable!) sensing platform on top of LoRa that I use all over my small farm. The nodes run on batteries and just send plaintext strings straight to InfluxDB. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6170483

Everything has been rock solid. Of the ten I've printed, only two have stopped working-- One of them got melted inside a compost pile, and the other got washed downstream during a flood.
2 comments
ul5255 825 days ago
Could you please expand a little on the setup of a hub/gateway in your project? I found the Arduino sketches for three sensors but it was not clear to me how one would go about the gateway those sensors would connect to.
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alexose 824 days ago
Yes, definitely. Thanks for motivating me to improve the documentation!

I switched the main project page over to GitHub, since it's a little easier to navigate. Check it out here: https://github.com/alexose/3D-Printing/tree/main/Dorothy

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ul5255 824 days ago
thanks a lot. I am looking for the longest time to get temperature sensors for the various radiators of our house's heating system (temperature of pipes entering/leaving each radiator plus room temperature, wall temperature). I found no suitable ready-made Zigbee sensors and developing my own seemed like a daunting task. Your setup looks like a very realistic option for my project.
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alexose 824 days ago
That's a cool use case. You should be able to use several DHT22 sensors per unit without too much trouble. If I were you, I'd consider mounting the unit on the wall near your radiator, then running some flexible 3 wire cable to all your various sensors.

I'd say the strength of my project is that it's fully open source and designed for casual hackers. The code is only a few hundred lines, and the hardware is all cheap commodity stuff.

The downside is that you'll need to get your hands dirty to set it up. But, there's a big upside in that you'll never get locked in to a proprietary service.

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3abiton 825 days ago
Coming from AI where LoRa means something else, I am very excited to try some of these application to my ZigBee setup.
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