And within fifteen minutes of someone figuring out that the whole sensor idea is a good thing, they’ll want to add another and another and another.
So you’ll develop a product that can handle multiple sensors and call it a gateway.
Thereby reinventing LoRaWAN. Which if local farmers all have gateways on a community network (TTN or yours), then they all get the benefit of shared coverage.
The farm based product will be one of the LoRaWan - the 1:1 product would be in the home consumer space, where current competing products are usually wired, sometimes wireless, but of very limited range. Really doesn’t need LoRa type ranges you see rural - It would tend to be Urban, or Suburban, range of 50-200 yards/meters, usually with 2-3 walls between. Just a BIT too far for WiFi. The use is more household than agricultural, industrial or commercial
Same still applies, they install one sensors, enjoy the benefits and want more. So you invent a gateway …
But you’ll be taken to the cleaners by Amazon with Sidewalk, so you probably want to go with an established standard to compete.
Missed Sidewalk.
But then again, you keep missing that for this product, it is selling a sensor box - ONE of them. We currently have a consumer product that uses WiFi - $280. Happens to use a WiFi feather. Data rates are low enough we could go LoRa. There are enough users were the distance from the unit to the WiFi is prohibitive. (not huge, say 200 meters). Most customers won’t own more that one, as it is one thing being monitored.
There’s a false assumption implicitly floating through this that the reason for a gateway is that you have multiple sensors.
That’s not really all that true; rather the reason for a gateway is that you have support of multiple channels and data rates, which greatly simplifies the on-air interaction by removing the need for coordination of time and data rate between the ends. If you lock a node to a single frequency and data rate, you’ve boxed yourself into a fairly small corner in terms of regulatory compliance.
It would, with care, be possible to design a protocol for anywhere from one to a few dozen sensors, which used node class radios on both ends and some sort of coordination scheme. But interesting as it would be to roll up ones sleeves and design, that protocol would not be LoRaWAN, would require a lot of engineering… and would not be on topic here.
There are several quite popular products on the market that have a 1:1 radio link using the ISM bands. A quick search for “weather stations” with “915MHz”, “865MHz” or “433MHz” will give plenty of results appropriate for different parts of the world. They usually claim a maximum range of about 100 metres from the sensors to an indoor base station. They use a variety of proprietary protocols, some of which have been decoded and are available for download on the internet.
LoRaWan is designed to give a significantly greater range, adapts to signal range, and more importantly has security designed in.
I’m on a farm and having fun experimenting with a variety of diy sensors. I have a couple of Raspberry Pi gateways. I plan to solar power one of them and put it on top of a hill to get to a signal to the back of the farm. I need less than 1 km range to cover the whole property.
A single gateway will support a huge number of well behaved nodes. I have no problem if my neighbours also decide to install sensors on TTN and don’t buy their own gateway. It’s a community network.