“My goal is to collect data over a larger distance than achievable with protocols like Wifi. I need a large amount of nodes and I also want to power the senders with batteries for the simple reason I do not have electricity where I want to collect data. The object I want to monitor is a big farm with distances over 1 Km.
In short I need:
Battery powered low-power nodes Long distance range Possibility to hook up several sensors like air temperature/humidity, soil temperature/humidity, amount of light and maybe CO2 levelsAffordable since I may need a lot of nodes to do proper monitoring on several hectares. I am thinking about at least 8 nodes per hectare.A way to collect and present the data. For this purpose I am tinkering with open source domotic software like Domoticz.
However: first I need a proof of concept, and I just finished step one: sending data from a DHT22 sensor over LoRa to another LoRa board. The maximum distance I measured was 700 meters, a promising start.
I have recently bought two TTGO LORA32 V2.0 433/868/915 mhz ESP32 LoRa OLED 0.96 inch Sd-kaart Blue Display ESP-32 WIFI Bluetooth Modules at Aliexpress. I have also bought two LoRa32u4 boards from bsfrance.fr which I have not been able to get to work.
This instructable will enable you to make a simple proof of concept, but is far from finished as you can read below.”