LoRa & LoRaWAN

@robg3987

Posted by: @robg3987

I recently had an idea to help my community with a little issue.

Background: We have some community doggie bag dispensers for owners like me that have pets to help clean up the inevitable mess left behind. These bags are on 3" rolls (900 bags) and we have 4 dispensers to manage and refill. We currently manually inspect each station to determine if they are empty or eventually get an email from a resident that one is empty.

I had thought there might be an opportunity to utilize a low power Arduino (eg MKR WAN 1310) with ultrasonic sensor and utilize a LoRa network to have the ability to monitor the roll size from each of the dispenser and trigger a notification for refill when one gets low.

My first stop was your site Bill, to see if you had any tutorials on setting up and using a LoRa or LoRaWan network, but didn't see anything. 
So I thought it might be an ideal opportunity for a new suggestion since this network seems ideal for the application I mentioned above and could be useful for future remote sensor applications.

Love the site, content, and your contributions to helping us all learn and explore!

Best regards

Rob

Hi Rob,

This sounds like a cool (and common) project, but doesn't necessarily require LoraWan technology, unless you have some super large distance to deal with?

I love the idea behind LoraWan, especially mesh networks.

Anyway, what have you tried, and where did you fail that you need help?

Cheers

@frogandtoad 

The distances apart and low power requirements is what originally got me think of a LoRa. The distances between are between 175m shortest and 265m longest.

At this stage I haven't started putting anything together, just early stages trying to understand if a LoRa might be appropriate, so I went here to see if Bill had put together any tutorials on LoRa/LoRaWAN. Didn't see any, so thought it would be a suggestion for Future ideas. Guess I posted in the wrong section. My apologizes and thank-you for the reply.

@robg3987 The swiss guy has lot's on LORA

@zander

I had to think about that for a sec, but then I remembered him (Andreas Spiess)! Thank you for reminding ! I'm looking at his episode #112 LoRa Tutorial which is a great place to start my work.

Thank you for the suggestion

Rob

@robg3987 He has a few I think, he uses them for his weather balloon experiments I think.

Posted by: @robg3987

My first stop was your site Bill, to see if you had any tutorials on setting up and using a LoRa or LoRaWan network, but didn't see anything. 
So I thought it might be an ideal opportunity for a new suggestion since this network seems ideal for the application I mentioned above and could be useful for future remote sensor applications.

Actually, I have already gathered together a pretty good assortment of LoRa devices with the intention of creating some Lora and LoraWAN content, so I can definitely say that this suggestion is approved!

😎

Bill

Posted by: @zander

@robg3987 The swiss guy has lot's on LORA

Andreas has some excellent LoRa content, and he probably holds the world record for LoRa range!

This video is a good one to check out if you are just getting started with LoRa.

😎

Bill