One of the things I fiddle with on/off is LoRa. For those unfamiliar, think of it as basically Zwave Long Range - but a lot less structured from a coding and defined capability (but more flexible too) and available today.
Anyone else tineker there? I am by no means an expert, but it is an interesting area for many of the same reasons zwave LR is interesting.
The downsides are:
Much more complicated to setup and get working than zwave LR will be.
Much fewer commercial devices available. More oriented to industrial use, municipalities, and tinkerers that don't mine making their own sensors.
Gateways are typically much more expensive than zwave gateways. Although for personal only use, a single channel gateway on an rpi isn't that expensive to make.
Yes, I have many LoRa+Microcontroller based home built sensors that communicate to a base station LoRa. Some are 1km away. The base station is a esp32+LoRa where I use Hubduino to send it to the HE hub. I code it all in Arduino.
Do either of you have any good "getting started" resources for LoRa? I really like the idea of using LoRa for devices where z-wave isn't possible/practical/cheap, but I'm having a hard time finding guidance on a base station that could then feed information into HE and/or a time-series db stack.
I have some LoRaWan sensors and a TheThingsNetwork indoor gateway - using their Uno device (Arduino based) - just playing at the moment. Have integration via another HA controller.
If you look over TheThingsNetwork website they have some good into videos but can't offer much help on a base station and into HE
I use chirpstack and the things network (for different purposes).
Chirpstack is all local and can feed directly into both mqtt and InfluxDB, but is more work to setup than TTN (as you are hosting your own application and network server, instead of using TTNs).
If you have an rpi with a supported LoRa chip/hat, chirpstack has their all-in-one GatewayOS build that makes it pretty painless to setup initially.
Hello, you can say something more. Can we see how you manage to work Hubduino via LoraWAN is the communication direct or using the TTN network? I would like to use TTN because my neighbor has a gateway thanks.
You need a LAN or WiFi connected board to get Hubduino to talk to Hubitat. You can use one or many LoRa boards as stations to send data to the main LoRa reciever board that will have Hubduino on it. That main board could be any Arduino board with a LoRa shield attached or one of those esp32/Lora combo boards.
I like this board for the stations. Low power consumption in sleep mode, on board battery charger so you can hook up Solar. You need to pick the freq per your location.
But I have a neighbor who already has a gateway on the TTN network. Maybe you know how to get data from esp32 / Lora board on HE. Something I found would go from TTN to HE via API ?
Thanks
There is no way to get it from ttn to hubitat. Someone would have to write an integration for it.
Alternatively you could probably go from ttn to node red to hubitat I guess. I wouldn't... But you probably technically could.
If I was making a custom device I would go through hubduino. If I was using a pre manufactured device I would send it to chirpstack or ttn, and then to node red.
Curious if anybody has looked into Helium Network integration. That would eliminate the need to setup a local gateway for those within the growing coverage area.
I think they wouldn't - you have to buy a device called a "miner" for around $400 or more and use that (and your own power) to generate a wireless "hotspot" and connect your LoRaWan devices to it? Is there even an API? To be fair that was just my 15 mins of "research".
Not sure where HE would even fit into such a scheme since one of it's strengths is local processing.
Kinda like the sneaky "Amazon Sidewalk" but with more upfront costs and Silicon Valley's dishonest foofery...(as opposed to Amazons!) sounds like an awful idea.
Apologies @kipa - but that is just my opinion. You'd probably do better using an MQTT broker.
Yeah that's what I thought at first too but after looking it up - you are supposed to purchase a miner (and that comes in different setups apparently)... and not sure how you cash in your "HNT"'s you generate.. but hey it checks all the buzzwords right? IoT, Wireless Hotspot, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain..
This is not about mining. This is about integrating LoRa devices with Hubitat. The Helium Network has nearly 1/2 million hotspot gateways worldwide. There would be zero functional difference in how Hubitat handles sensor data.
It seems to be all about generating "HNT"s more than anything else...
I am NOT against a wide area ioT device network and am probably misunderstanding a lot of things about this because I am not really up on my LoRaWan stuff. Crypto currency generation aside what would the use-case for something like this be for the typical homeowner?
thanks.
