Hi There!
I have a small appliction that consists in a Dragino LDDS75 that sends distance measurements in a tank to TTN, and a Dragino LT2222 relay output that has to turn off a pump when the level at the tank is too high, receiving uplink from TTN
I need to provide a simple panel for my customer that shows the current tank level and historic data. That’s it
Can anyone suggest a simple enough, ideally free or low cost, IoT cloud that I can integrate with TTN and allows me to create a simple panel for my client, and lets me program the uplink to the relay qhen the measured distance is above XX ?
All the platforms I’ve tried are too complex and suitable for very large projects, and also expensive for this project. And one free platform I’ve tried doesn’t have the device profile for this LDDS75 so it won’t show anything although it does receive the data
Probably simpler to knock up a quick HTML/PHP combo as pretty much everything has bells & whistles these days.
Two things to note:
LoRaWAN isn’t best suited for command & control due to downlinks not necessarily happening at the time you want - its better to have the local device(s) know what the settings are & act autonomously.
TTN aka Sandbox is not setup for commercial / actual applications - if anything glitches you are on your own and I doubt your client will be too happy about you using a test setup to run a service for them.
On that last point, I’m sure @rish1 will be happy to advise.
Thanks but provided my programming skills are limited, I will definitely waster more time in getting a domain name/hosting, programming and testing the controls, etc rather than learning a simple (hopefully) IoT platform to add 2 devices and create a basic panel
Also I have to behaviour so it sends a relay command downling when the uplink data contains a certain value…Way beyond my skills
Yes I understand that a real time control is not the best scenario for a LoRaWAN downlink->ttn->IoT panel->uplink route, but for this client this is how we need to do it.
Anyone can suggest a quick and cheap platform to visualize data and program an uplink on a basic condition?
First of all, please get your LoRaWAN packet directions right. To TTN is uplink, to device is downlink.
Next, there is no such thing as free beer. For commercial use you will have to either invest yourself or spend with existing cloud providers that all want to make money and are not cheap. As @descartes already mentioned, TTN is not for commercial activities either, you need a TTI hosted instance that will cost money as well.
Yes those are what Im looking at. The thing is most of them require a long time to understand their structure and usually after a lot of invested time and initial cost, you find out there’s something that doesn’t match your requirements. That’s why I was asking for advice from someone who has already tried them. I tried a webhook integration with MyIoT and it won’t let me do what I need
I had already worked a lot with ThingSpeak for custom devices I’ve developed with Sigfox but unfortunately it doesn’t integrate with TTN afaik
Yes I can definitely program, I have programmed C, C++, assembler for many devices, some PHP and some java, but I don’t manage a modern environment to develop a safe/reliable windows or web application that I can show a client in a timely manner. Something like thingspeak solved my necessities for a long time until this client required LoRaWAN instead of Sigfox…
Thanks!
I very much doubt that anyone has tried even the majority of them and we’ve no definition of cheap to work to. And the definition of easy is variable - for me, being a Ninja Integration / Web App / Dashboard person almost all of them are easy once you’ve figured the insane user experience because hardly anyone has the money of Microsoft who do extensive user testing or Google who just run A+B+C+D testing on us all.
Your best bet is to visit each site to look at the pricing to find the ones that suit your budget and then ask - a shortlist is so much easier to speak to than just asking for random recommendations, particularly as we don’t know your definition of cheap.
As comparison sites appear to be a new form of sport these days, you may get some insight from one of them - Google appears to provide plenty of lists of sites that list.
Alright, some updates here…
First of all as definitely, yes, I assumed that Thingspeak was not among the supported integrations but it was, and somehow I went to check right after I said “it’s not” and I found it under webhooks, yeah…Sorry for that
I tried to setup an integration with TTN and it worked right away after some custom payload decoder tuning
Ok I still have the problem of the sandbox/not for comercial use/TTN solution. The cost for “Industries” is way beyond my scope. I had already setup a raspberry Chirpstack server. As it was a v4, its’ integration with MyIoT (my first approach for an cheap/free Iot platform) is very limited so I discarded Chirpstack and went to TTN. Now that MyIoT is out of the equation, I’m turning my Chrispstack server back on and pointing my gateway back to it, and checking how easy it is to integrate Chirpstack and Thingspeak, as this would minimize the risk of data loss/server uptime, as this solely relies on myself and I have ways to grant it
Thanks Descartes and Jeff-UK for you. Others have been limited to highlight my ability to fail as a human to identify up/downlink, which I totally understand as this is not a new concept to me, having programmed arduino/TTGO/wisblock/etc devices from the ground up to use LoRa & LoRaWAN but like I said errare humanum est, and some can quickly rise a flag when you fail, but not provide much more help on the propossed topic
You got the definitions the wrong way round, were corrected, there’s no more detail to add. But your response won’t inspire help in the future if we have to thrash around encouraging you to do some research prior to posting and then you poke at perhaps the most experienced of us all.
As to the economics, good luck with providing your client with an SLA …
No worries descartes. I’m old enough to express what I feel with zero fear of regreting about it. As for commercial SLA there’s not really something like that, let’s say this is a project for a close friend.
Anyway we already swerved towards a local ChirpStack implementation so both TTN/TTI are out of the equation for now. The server is already up&running so we are all good now
Thanks for your time and replies!