Well without arguing whether Helium is the right way for a community LoRa network vs something like TTN, I'll just say that "no, I don't know of anyone working on a Helium Network integration to Hubitat".
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While the push for many to get involved with Helium is crypto driven, the network is open to all LoRa devices. Instead of just tracking the status of something within range of a home gateway, the potential exists to track data from anywhere in the world a Helium hotspot is within range. I'm not sure about global use, but being able to pull data in from the Helium network would be useful for local devices just as well as any local gateway based solution aside from having to traverse the cloud. I.e., for somebody like me, it would eliminate the need to setup an independent gateway since I already have a hotspot in my house.
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Yup, that would be the draw of something like The Things Network or Helium. With the obvious drawback of cloud dependency, lesser reliability, etc.
Okay thanks for clarification!! I was not sure how useful it could be but I guess I am seeing it now - kind of a different concept. So you could theoretically have devices at various locations without needing a hub except at a central place. Could also maybe use as a car tracker as well. A concern would be the network going down and still having access. I realize the long range nature helps with this though.
Hello, I posted on the HubDuino thread and @ogiewon recommended I refer my thoughts to this post for any ideas. What I'm trying to achieve is a Lora/GPS LILYGO TTGO T-Beam board as a Sender and a Lora ESP board as a receiver that would connect to Hubitat for the purpose of using GPS data from receiver to determine geofence presence detection. The use case for this is vehicle arrival without the dependency of mobile network and mobile device. Below is part of that discussion:
I want to ditch the mobile phone as a requirement for presence in the vehicle and stop tracking phones in Life360. And the failed smartthings arrival technique of using zigbee is not even worth whatever $$ they forgot to put into development.
At present, I use mobile devices for each driver/user and through webcore I tag/link that device when the vehicle departs the garage (known by z-wave pressure sensors driven over as they depart) to the mobile device as (vehicle_presence_device) so that when the driver/user returns their arrival will be known as the "vehicle'" arrival. Its a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea.
All of these well known methods are dependent upon the use of mobile service and android/iphone as the presence device. What can be done using LoRa of which I'm sure your knowledgeable, however for others, I'll simply state the protocol being a long range, low power, low bandwidth, license free communication standard. It's capable of transmitting a signal up to 5-8km or so in open air. For my purpose, 400-500 ft or less than 0.5 km will suffice.
The LoRa protocol is not the point of this topic at heart, its the GPS coordinates and getting them into HE in a like manner as Life360 and other apps. I can with your awesome work in HubDuino have the geo boundary calculated in and Arduino sketch example like this:
const float maxDistance = 500; float distance = distanceCoordinates(latitude, longitude, initialLatitude, initialLongitude); if (distance < maxDistance) { arrival = true; }And then do some things to trigger the HubDuino presence component to let HE know that the presence event has occurred.
I was hoping for a direct sensor and child component that would read the incoming gps data, calculate the distance and determine if it has arrived/departed the preset boundary. On the HE side it would be seen as a simple presence device like any other. The gain is that with a few dollars of hardware on an ESP12 board with built-in LoRa and gps module, the presence detector would be a self sufficient and stand alone device, not reliant on the user/drivers mobile phone. It's a cheaper and point-to-point method of FleetTrack or Linxup devices, but without the cloud subscription fees.
I would imagine if someone, an actual developer, not there myself, would also be able to add more fancy stuff into the mix, like having fields in the HE device driver side where the user can enter in parameters for boundary distance, polling interval, and so on.
Seems doable. You can pass anything to HE thru hubduino with some custom code.
Definitely doable from a technical standpoint. Whether you will get good enough range or not 100% depends on placement and antennas.
I do something similar-ish, although I don't use gps. I do have a lorawan gateway so I use that instead of another receiver node. The data ends up in mqtt for use in Hubitat or node-red.
On mine, the range from the car sensor is knocked down so much by it being in the center console that I just use whether the gateway has communication with the device or not as my home indication. I don't live in a super dense area, so a wider circle for my home indication is fine with me. In my testing I only get a few blocks of distance from the sensor in my car to my indoor gateway. Still enough for me though.
@JasonJoel Can you tell me what ESP Lora boards you used for car sensor application and if they had external antenna? I thought of just using RSSI and LOS to trigger since for me as well, its just a simple matter of it becoming in a small radius of detection, say 10 or 15 houses before arrival.
I already have a solid vehicle departure system using a very well made pressure pad connect to the Aeotec Door/Window Sensor 7 Series which accepts external contacts as input. So, when the vehicle rolls over it a toggle is made to change from parked/unparked, kinda like old time full service ding/ding approach.
The webcore driven Arrival piston I have works off of the drivers Life360 presence and works well, but still I'm not actually doing vehicle arrival I'm doing driver arrival and making some logical assumptions that one of those arriving is in a vehicle, like if the car left garage and then presence changed within 5 mins they most likely are the driver. So, I assign a variable based on that user's presence device and so on... For the android devices I can get less fuzzy in the logic, since tasker can flip a virtual switch in HE when the BT is joined in the vehicle. But iphone is too restrictive and I gave up on the shortcuts being able to detect BT as an option.
Anyway, I did look into making an actual lora cloud or helium gateway for the internet things network route, but for this application that seems overkill. Maybe down the road, lol...
I use these four primarily:
(note that the case in that Amazon listing doesn't fit the US external antenna (just the on-board coil one which sucks), so better to buy w/o the case)
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