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Category Archives: LoRa
Custom LoRa Pager Designed With Care
LoRa is a useful technology if you need to send data a long way at low power levels. Leveraging this, [5Volt-Junkie] decided to build a small pager named the LoRaNicator.
Those who love a detailed build log will enjoy this. The pager features everything up to and including the kitchen …read more
Posted in LoRa, radio hacks
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DIY Mini Helical Antennas From Salvaged Co-ax Cable
[Mare] has a visual guide and simple instructions for making DIY mini helical 868 MHz antennas for LoRa applications. 868 MHz is a license-free band in Europe, and this method yields a perfectly serviceable antenna that’s useful where space is constrained.
The process is simple and well-documented, but as usual with antenna design it requires attention to detail. Wire for the antenna is silver-plated copper, salvaged from the core of RG214U coaxial cable. After straightening, the wire is wound tightly around a 5 mm core. 7 turns are each carefully spaced 2 mm apart. After that, it’s just a matter …read more
Vinduino Water-Smart Farming – Now with LoRa!
Our five rounds of Hackaday Prize 2018 challenges have just wrapped up, and we’re looking forward to see where the chips fall in the final ranking. While we’re waiting for the winners to be announced at Hackaday Superconference, it’s fun to take a look back at one of our past winners. Watch [Reinier van der Lee] give the latest updates on his Vinduino project (video also embedded after the break) to a Hackaday Los Angeles meetup earlier this year.
Vinduino started with [Reinier]’s desire to better understand what happens to irrigation water under the surface, measuring soil moisture at different …read more
Posted in 2015 Hackaday Prize, 2018 Hackaday Superconference, agriculture, Arduino Hacks, green hacks, Hackaday Prize, Hackaday Supercon, Hackaday SuperConference, irrigation, irrigation controller, LoRa, soil moisture sensor, The Hackaday Prize, Vinduino, water conservation, water irrigation
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Putting M5Stack on LoRa and the Things Network
LoRa is the new hotness in low-power, long-range communications. Wanting to let the packets fly, [Xose] was faced with a frequecny problem and ended up developing a Europe-friendly LoRa module for the M5Stack system. The hardware is aimed at getting onto The Things Network, a LoRa based network that provides connectivity for IoT devices. While there was an existing M5Stack module for LoRa, it only supported 433 MHz. Since [Xose] is in Europe, an 868 MHz or 915 MHz radio was needed. To solve this, a custom board was built to connect the HopeRF RFM69 series of modules to the …read more
Posted in ESP32, LoRa, M5Stack, The Things Network, wireless hacks
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Harley-Hardened Wire Helps High-Gain Antenna Hack
What does a Harley-Davidson motorcycle have to do with building antennas? Absolutely nothing, unless you happen to have one and need to work-harden copper wire to build a collinear antenna for LoRa.
We’ll explain. Never being one to settle, [Andreas Spiess] needed a better antenna for his LoRa experiments. Looking for high gain and an omnidirectional pattern, he bought a commercial colinear antenna, which is a wire with precisely spaced loops that acts like a stack of dipoles. Sadly, in a head-to-head test [Andreas] found that the commercial antenna was no better than lower gain antennas in terms of range, …read more
Posted in collinear, copper, Harley-Davidson, LoRa, motorcycle, radio hacks, stiffness, strain-hardening, stretch, work-hardening
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LoRa With The ESP32
If you are interested in deploying LoRa — the low power long-range wireless technology — you might enjoy [Rui Santos’] project and video about using the ESP32 with the Arduino IDE to implement LoRa. You can see the video below. He uses the RFM95 transceivers with a breakout board, so even if you want to use a different processor, you’ll still find a lot of good information.
In fact, the video is just background on LoRa that doesn’t change regardless of the host computer you are using. Once you have all the parts, getting it to work is fairly simple. …read more
Posted in LoRa, RFM95, wireless hacks
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Fail Of The Week: Never Trust A Regulator Module
[Ryan Wamsley] has spent a lot of time over the past few months working on a new project, the Ultimate LoRa backplane. This is as its name suggests designed for LoRa wireless gateways, and packs in all the features he’d like to see in a LoRa expansion for the Nano Pi Duo.
His design features a three-terminal regulator, and in the quest for a bit more power efficiency he did what no doubt many of you will have done, and gave one of those little switching regulator modules in a three-terminal footprint a go. As part of his testing he …read more
Posted in LoRa, parts, regulator
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The Solid State Weather Station
Building personal weather stations has become easier now than ever before, thanks to all the improvements in sensors, electronics, and prototyping techniques. The availability of cheap networking modules allows us to make sure these IoT devices can transmit their information to public databases, thereby providing local communities with relevant weather data about their immediate surroundings.
[Manolis Nikiforakis] is attempting to build the Weather Pyramid — a completely solid-state, maintenance free, energy and communications autonomous weather sensing device, designed for mass scale deployment. Typically, a weather station has sensors for measuring temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and rainfall. While most of …read more
Posted in inertial, LoRa, LoRaWAN, mpu-9150, mpu6050, Rain sensor, The Hackaday Prize, weather, wind sensor
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Sniff Your Local LoRa Packets
As the LoRa low-bandwidth networking technology in license-free spectrum has gained traction on the wave of IoT frenzy, LoRa networks have started to appear in all sorts of unexpected places. Sometimes they are open networks such as The Things Network, other times they are commercially available networks, and then, of course, there are entirely private LoRa installations.
If you are interested in using LoRa on a particular site, it’s an interesting exercise to find out what LoRa traffic already exists, and to that end [Joe Broxson] has put together a useful little device. Hardware wise it’s an Adafruit Cortex M0 …read more
Posted in LoRa, radio hacks
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ISM Communications for Arduino
If you want to wirelessly communicate between devices, WiFi and Bluetooth are obvious choices. But there’s also the ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) band that you use. There are inexpensive modules like the SX1278 that can handle this for you using LoRa modulation, but they haven’t been handy to use with an Arduino. [Jan] noticed the same thing and set out to build a shield that allowed an Arduino to communicate using LoRa. You can find the design data on GitHub. [Jan] calls it the LoRenz shield.
According to [Jan], the boards cost about $20 to $30 each to make, …read more
Posted in ISM, ISM band, ISM radio, LoRa, sx1278, wireless, wireless hacks
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