Simple LORA weather station for School farm

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bleepboop
 
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Simple LORA weather station for School farm

Post by bleepboop »

Hi everyone,

Looking for a good a-z tutorial on setting up a weather station that transmits humidity and temperature from a school farm to the main building about 700 ft. We have a 12 volt solar panel and battery as power on the farm but no signals such as wifi or cellular to transmit the data. Thus, from reading around, LORA seems like a great fit. However finding the right unit and putting everything together is a bit daunting. Would like to build this then teach it as a class perhaps adding more sensors along the way. Any help appreciated,

Jeff

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: Simple LORA weather station for School farm

Post by Franklin97355 »

Could you tell us what you want to do with the info? How do you want it to be displayed and do you want to record the info (Adafruit IO or other )? It helps if we have a direction to go with. Thanks.

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bleepboop
 
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Re: Simple LORA weather station for School farm

Post by bleepboop »

Hi Franklin,

Our goal is to send temperature and humidity readings from the green house on the farm to a Tft display in the main building, say once every hour. Originally, it was only to view "real time" readings with no recording but upon reflection, recording those readings would be useful and educational (graphing those readings over the course of a day, week, month, year) so yes, record the info if it doesn't add too much complexity. There is no available connectivity on the farm i.e. wifi, cellular but there is a 12 volt solar panel and battery system. My son installed this to supply power to a ver.1 attempt at building this sensor system using Arduino with which he has some familiarity. He used the tutorial below but was unsuccessful in getting it all to work. The main challenge was being unfamiliar with using radios and data transmission within the constraints mentioned above. Having done a little more research, it seems LoRa is the way to go in terms of power consumption, range and application (essentially off grid). Since you "don't know what you don't know" it's daunting to see all the flavors of LoRA boards but an example of the simplicity we're looking for would be something like this tutorial on miliohm.

Hope this is more clear.

Jeff

https://miliohm.com/how-to-send-sensor- ... h-arduino/

Arduino weather station (ver. 1):
http://educ8s.tv/arduino-wireless-weather-station/

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sj_remington
 
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Re: Simple LORA weather station for School farm

Post by sj_remington »

If you have clear line of sight over the 700 feet, just about any radio module will work. You do need decent antennas, for 433 MHz a balanced dipole works very well (34 cm from tip to tip). Connect one inner terminal to ANT on the radios and the other inner antenna terminal to GND on the radios -- the "other" antenna connection.

The very cheapest Chinese 433 MHz modules achieve up to 1 km range with clear line of sight, using the setup pictured below. I have been using the TX/RX pair below for several years, to signal the presence of vehicles at a driveway gate about 300 meters from the house. Naturally, a more robust power supply than a PP3 battery is used! The VirtualWire Arduino library controls the radios.
dipole.png
dipole.png (805.32 KiB) Viewed 578 times

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bleepboop
 
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Re: Simple LORA weather station for School farm

Post by bleepboop »

Thanks for the post sj! Love the DIY aspect of this. You answered a question as well on the use of a 433 MHz frequency. Curious how long your pp3 battery last with this set up; depending on how many visitors you get, it would seem this module is drawing very little power.

Jeff

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sj_remington
 
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Re: Simple LORA weather station for School farm

Post by sj_remington »

"how long your pp3 battery last with this set up"

Maybe 30 minutes, if fresh. Plenty of time for a photo op.

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