Hey Guys,
I’m new to The Things Network and need a few tipps.
What I want to do is:
Connect my ofgrid Greenhouse to the IoT to manage Water and Ventilation Systems.
Build another Node to messure Temperature and Moisture in my vineyard.
My Questions:
Which hardware do you recomment to start with ( Gateway, Node, …)? I 'll be glad if there are more than one suggestions so I can build my own opinion.
Do I need a Gateway, or can I use TTN without one ?
Distances between nodes and my living place are maximum 2000m. But there is no direct view.
Might this be a problem?
LoRaWAN (with TTN) is not suited for real-time control. You will have at least minutes delay, possibly up to hours when sending data to a node.
You can use LoRaWAN if you implement the logic in the greenhouse and use the nodes to monitor or send (infrequent) parameter updates to the nodes.
Hello kersing, thanks for you answer. I don’t want a realtime control. I want to monitor when, e.g. watering begins, temperature is too high etc. The logic of the greenhouse should be implemented there, not in the network.
Maybe my questions were not precise enough.
Manuel
Reporting conditions at a slow period, or when the sprinklers kick on could indeed be a sensible use case.
Bear in mind though that building a system to run at the far end of such a narrow pipe can cost a lot of effort. If there’s one greenhouse, putting an embedded system you can actually ssh into on an LTE modem may be worth the monthly cost - then you can go in, examine full logs, patch your python script or whatever runs things, get a picture off a webcam, etc.
We actually do something similar for node development - several test node sit remotely (where they will operate at a slower spreading factor than if they were near the gateway) each connected to a raspberry pi which both collects its serial debug log, and has a programmer which can reflash the node, so in addition to the LoRaWAN-like packets it sends summarizing conditions, we can actually look at and fine-tune its decision making process. Those pi’s happen to be indoors on wifi, but if they were more remote could be on the same sort of LTE modem card we use in gateways (and if it were a production rather than development system, the computer wouldn’t literally be a pi)
Hei cslorabox,
thanks for your detailed explanation.
Unfortunately I didn’t understand half of that. I’m an absolutly newbe to lora.
Please try to explain a bit more low level. Appriciate that.
Manuel
Few comments as I saw your question. What you are asking for seems similar to environmental monitoring (like weather stations) respectively use cases for IoT in agriculture. LoRaWAN has its advantages but also its limits.
Measuring the temperature and transmitting it every hour with a battery powered TTN node because you don’t have electricity at the place and don’t need to get data every minute, why not.
Controlling the water and ventilation system, well, better not.
Searching in the forum you should be able to find a number of posts related to nodes that are measuring temperature/humidity or even soil moisture and transmit that data frequently using the TTN uplink messages. You will have to have a gateway around that receives the data and routes it to the TTN backend servers to which your application could connect to in order to retrieve the data - to display, store, whatever.
Going the other way round, that is, sending data/commands via TTN to the nodes via downlink message, eg to switch on the ventilation - should not be considered. That’s the real-time control thingy mentioned above.
Just tried to summarize in my own words what the guys above had stated, hope it helps.
I agree with suendermarkus. I think you would need to check out weather-monitoring solutions like Climacell to correlate the data with your needs with LoRAWan. You would get a range of information that you can use to manage your greenhouse.
Thank you for your response. Your wrote " LoRaWAN (with TTN) is not suited for real-time control. You will have at least minutes delay, possibly up to hours when sending data to a node.". May I ask is this a LoRa general issue, or a TTN specific issue? And, what are the factors that may cause the delay?
That is generic LoRaWAN issue for all networks not implementing class C. To know why and what contributes to the delay, please read up on basic LoRaWAN information regarding the different classes of nodes.
You send messages to a specific URL address in a whole host of ways - type it in to your browser, use cURL or wget or use a variety of different functions in different languages.
