Is TTN a good fit for my use-case? (Monitoring, long-term)

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Hi everyone,

there is a gym in my local town, run by volunteers, without any internet access. I‘d like to place a few temperature/humidity sensors there as well as (optionally) a few thermostats and I wonder if TTN is a good fit for this purpose or whether I should look into other solutions. I hope you can give me some input here.

I live maybe 200m away and would be able to put up a LoRaWAN gateway. Two to three people should have access to the sensors (and the thermostats), ideally with a historic timeline and the possibility to trigger warnings (e.g. by mail) in certain circumstances.

Is this a use-case TTN is suitable for and is there ready-made software for this? I’ve got no issues doing an initial setup, but I am not interested in wiring my own dashboard software or having the whole setup depend on me being available for the long run (except maybe running the gateway).

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Yes, for LoRa/LoRaWAN, not many other radio hardware has a reliable reach >50m and a good community application, so yes for TTN.

Ish, possibly, not really, depending on how you view things.

If you look at a flat tyre on your car and immediately call the rescue services, it’s going to be a no.

If you sigh and open the handbook in the glovebox and follow the instructions, yes.

If you shrug your shoulders and get the jack & spare out, hack about a bit and then look in the handbook for the tip that gets the pressure sensors disconnected, then you’ll be absolutely fine.

If you get the jack & spare out and quickly introduce a hammer in to the mix, then please don’t try, or at least, keep the self-inflicted pain to yourself.


Buying a temperature & humidity device is absolutely fine - pretty much all of them come with some instructions, quite a few on getting it on to TTN, and then there are The Things Stack docs as well. This also covers getting the data out of TTN and on to its forever home with a dashboard & alerts.

So you need to find a dashboard service - many of which are integrated in to TTS to streamline the process and many of which will automagically setup dials &/or charts. Alerts via email are relatively normal and you can configure them to go to an SMS service. Some dashboards include SMS alerts.

Dashboards vary in price from free to mega-bucks but many of them provide a free tier that can do a handful of devices. Free SMS alerts are generally very rare.

Once setup & left to just do it’s job, there is very little maintenance, if any, to do. Perhaps change the batteries in about 3 to 5 years time.

You should monitor overall power use so that if someone is using the gym to run their 20kW gadget you get alerts for excessive power use. And light sensors, so you can check if the lights have been turned off. Making a read-only version of the dashboard for public consumption allows you to gamify a reduction in energy costs - people can look at what was being used when they were there and figure stuff out themselves.

Check out the basics of LoRaWAN so you can make informed choices about what to buy and feel free to ask for recommendations. I make these things so can’t really speak much about off the shelf stuff. Don’t try to watch the video in one go, it makes most brains explode.

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Additionally, I’d note that there aren’t many eco-systems where you buy various devices and get to have an online dashboard fallout the box - lots of different ways of getting the data up to a central location but few that come done from end to end. The ones that are around are usually constrained to a particular range of devices and are premium products.

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I would agree with these comments. I recently bought some Milesight temperature and humidity sensors for this type of application. Getting them on the TTN dashboard using my own Gateway was fairly straight forward.

The problem comes when you want the client to receive the data and display it. In the first instance I used MQTT Explorer which is a desktop application which subscribes to the readings (uplink messages) and will display the results in a simple graph. This seems to work fine but of course is only available to me (local not cloud).

I am now creating my own MQTT client but of course that is not a 5 minute job,

There are other cloud based clients but they typically require a monthly subscription

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If you connect the sensors to TTN you can use IoTAssistant to get graphs or alerts via Telegram for the sensor values or the battery levels.

IoTAssistant is free software like Home Assistant but its easier to setup. You can run it locally on a cheap device like a Rapberry Pi Zero or deploy it on a cloud infrastructure. Its also provided Arduino examples to integrate sensors using ESP32 to TTN.

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