We have a project where we would need to monitor the air temperature in approx. 20 devices per building, across the country.
I’ve researched through the internet, and found about LoRa technology (our company has a limited expertise in this technology, but we are fast-learners).
Tell me if using LoRa would be feasable, and what would imply as costs. From what i’ve researched, we would need to cover a building:
End Node (Sensor) x 20 pcs.
Lora Gateway to Wi-Fi (1x ) - we don’t think we can have coverage in all country
Welcome to TTN
This is a classic/bread & butter use case for LoRa/LoRaWAN, but as ever the devil is in the details. Where in the world are you as there may be vendors or TTN community members close by who can help you refine requirements and get going or even deploy for you.
How often updating data, target temp range, structural build of target location(s), proximity to existing GW’s or new GW needed, backhaul availability, required App integration, COTS or self build hardware, ease of placement/access/maintenance needs (e.g. for future battery replacement on nodes etc.) will all impact your decisions and way forward. There are also many ‘pre-canned’ example systems that might be appropriate depending on requirements & use case…
there are lots of t-sensors on the market. If you need more the temperature (like humidity, CO2 etc.) maybe www.elsys.se is worth a look (no, I get no provision…).
Gateway selection depends much on the location and the network. We have used one low cost gateways (like the ttn-GW 868) with good very coverage in an old building with about 5.000m², but a second gateway as a backup may be a good idea (and is not very expensive). There might be other reasons to choose a different gateway. For example, we have not been able to log in to eduroam, as they have a slightly different login procedure that was not supportet.
You can use TTN to set up an integration, but we found it much easier to use node-red as a relay. You can have node-red running behind a firewall and connect via MQTT (or the TTN-Node) to get the data. This makes it very easy to filter and manipulate your data before connection to your app.
Currently we have node-red running on a cloud server, which is not expensive and very convenient to handle. We found also that influx-db performs very well on the same server and is easy to integrate with node-red and TTN.
until we get more info on where in the world etc. there’s little to add…