[HN Gopher] Show HN: Extend Zigbee sensor range with LoRaWAN
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Show HN: Extend Zigbee sensor range with LoRaWAN
Author : ha_ru
Score : 70 points
Date : 2024-03-18 09:06 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ha_ru wrote:
| Hi! This project (LoRaBridge) was born few years ago as I was
| trying to figure out how to get data from the cheap Zigbee
| sensors in my cellar. In my case, the cellar is not immediately
| below the main living space, so the Zigbee range even with some
| repeater nodes was just not enough. One day, out of curiosity, I
| bought two LoRa modems, mounted one of them in the cellar and the
| second one in the 2nd floor of the house. I was blown away by the
| fact that I got a stable connection through so much concrete(!).
| That was pretty much the light bulb moment for how my solution
| would look like.
|
| Fast forward 2-3 years, after a (funded!) open source project,
| there is now a way to mount Zigbee sensors in remote locations.
| Essentially the solution is a wireless bride, which works like
| this:
|
| - A remote Raspberry PI unit collects&compresses zigbee data and
| transmits it over LoRaWAN
|
| - LoRaWAN gateway/servers forward the data towards second PI,
| which decompresses the data ,takes care of the device management
| and sends the data further to, e.g., home assistant.
|
| And as a bonus: The device joining process is as easy as it is
| with zigbee2mqtt ;)
| dmos62 wrote:
| That's awesome. How did you fund the project?
| tim330i wrote:
| Cool story! Was there a reason using existing LoRa sensors was
| off the table? YoLink and maybe others are cheap.
| Runways wrote:
| Yolink requires cloud.
| nogridbag wrote:
| Kind of. I use their waterleak sensors and pair them
| directly with their YoLink Siren. The siren will go off
| without cloud, internet, or even power (until the batteries
| run out).
| nogridbag wrote:
| I have around 30 YoLink sensors scattered about our house
| (mainly for detecting water leaks). And for a long time I
| only had the single hub in the basement on the complete
| opposite end of the house. I never had any signal issue and
| they've all worked flawlessly.
|
| I haven't needed to change the batteries on a single sensor
| yet for multiple years. I did get 2 of their SpeakerHubs
| which also act range extenders, but it's completely
| unnecessary since the single hub is perfectly fine wherever
| you put it. I mainly use the SpeakerHubs as sirens, but they
| can also do text to speech, e.g. "(Loud Siren) Water Leak
| detected in master bath".
|
| They've already saved me a couple of times.
|
| I keep reading about all these standards for connected
| devices e.g. Matter, but in the end these just work perfectly
| for my use case.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| The ability of LoRaWAN to transmit through almost anything is
| black magic. It works reliably down to 20 dB below the noise
| floor at maximum spreading factor. You can still get sporadic
| operation at -30 dB SNR.
|
| We once tested putting sensors 8ft under ground, down a manhole
| for the water mains. They kept on working through dirt, steel
| and concrete even with the manhole cover in place.
| HanClinto wrote:
| Very nice work!!
|
| I've been very interested in LoRaWAN ever since I first heard
| about it, and I am excited to see more projects like this pop up!
| bhaney wrote:
| What in the sam hill is a "LoRaWAN GPS Concentrator"?
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > Sam Hill
|
| Thanks, TIL this phrase.
|
| > LoRaWAN GPS Concentrator
|
| So the "GPS" is oddly placed in the name, it just means "using
| a GPS receiver to have accurate clock on the gateway".
|
| The "Concentrator" part is just another name for gateway, but
| specifically one that receives data from different devices over
| LoRaWAN, collects the data into packets and sends it on to a
| database or other application somewhere - typically over 4G/5G
| or wired internet.
| bhaney wrote:
| >"GPS" is oddly placed in the name
|
| Thanks, that was what confused me I guess. I saw results for
| "LoRaWAN Concentrator" that mostly made sense, but "GPS
| Concentrator" was throwing me for a loop.
| tamimio wrote:
| Interesting, might be useful to have in your small farm while
| monitoring (maybe controlling) the irrigation system in there!
| alexose wrote:
| LoRa is really a fantastic tool for outdoor sensing.
|
| I built a (free! open source! 3d printable!) sensing platform on
| top of LoRa that I use all over my small farm. The nodes run on
| batteries and just send plaintext strings straight to InfluxDB.
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6170483
|
| Everything has been rock solid. Of the ten I've printed, only two
| have stopped working-- One of them got melted inside a compost
| pile, and the other got washed downstream during a flood.
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