Posts

Not a LoRaWAN sensor - yet! But useful oil burner monitor

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 I put this together yesterday for the Mens Shed. It now needs to undergo field trials. And you can see its graphs at:  https://shannontownwetlands.ie/environmental-sensors/shannon-town-mens-shed-central-heating The wiring of the three DS18B20 three wire (ground, power and data) probes in parallel and connecting two 2K2R resistors in series was tricky and I cable tied the arrange to a clothes peg! How to get Tasmota on the device is covered here (and its part 1 video): You can use the Tasmota menus to cusomise the name of the sensor and the prefix for the MQTT topic it sends its temperature values to tele/shannon_town_mens_shed/tasmota_3157E1/SENSOR I then wrote some Node-Red code to subscribe to this topic and create a document with the three temperatures to publish to my MongoDB account so I can create a chart (graph) I can embed into blogs and websites.

Created slan-008 and slan-093 sensors

These are based on Heltec LoRa Capsules. A good write is available here: https://emanuelepagliari.it/2020/11/09/arduino-lorawan-heltec-cubecell-capsule-review/ Unfortunately, Heltec's own website have dropped their webpages for these devices! Why do manufacturers do this? Cannot they move them to an archive or past products page "hall of Fame". Others still seem s to be selling them though: https://iotci.co.uk/product/heltec-lora-node-asr6502-capsule-sensors-cubecell-sensor-for-arduino-lora-iot-waterproof-ip67-soalr-panel/ They are cute little devices the size of a Kindle egg and have a small solar powered li-ion battery and swapable sensors. So both slan-008 and slan-093 use these devices with a BME680 sensor plugged in. Here's a debug listing from the Arduino IDE sketch flashed to a similar slan-012:  

Restored LoRaWAN antenna on gable end and did a range test

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 Between the showers I got my ladder out and made a new gable end antenna.  The range test using a CubeCell Capsule gave good results reaching over 500 m so I'm hoping that tomorrow with a better sensor I should be able to reach Westpark Campus. I can now concentrate on getting all me LoRaWAN sensors up and running again :) And if I try a directional antenna on a sensor that is elevated I may achieve 1 Km range!

Today I made a video to promote SLÁN - Shannon Lorawan Area Network and also did some range testing

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I boxed up my two LoRaWAN gateways today and did some range testing. Using just a Heltec CubeCell Capsule (that I normally have on my window sill to capture outside temperatures) I got surprising good results considering it only has the tiniest of internal antenna. I'm getting a range of up to 500m. Here's a view of the signal strengths at different locations. And that's with the gateway's antenna inside the house. Soon I will remount the antenna back outside at the top of the gable end of the house which should double the signal range especially when using a sensor with an external stub antenna. Below is the 2 minute YouTube video giving an introduction to the SLÁN network which I can share with people to generate interest in the project and to give an overview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC2MjA4rf-U Well tomorrow I will get a few more LoRa sensors up and running again and share their graphs at: https://shannontownwetlands.ie/environmental-sensors Interestingly, h...