+Devran Uenal Thanks mate. Good to hear you're getting something out of my channel, both technical and humour!

+Amitesh Singh Thanks mate. They're a lot of fun. If you want to make it easier for yourself then get the boards with 2.54mm spacing or there's a PCB adaptor on tindie that you can get that'll convert the 2mm to 2.54mm spacing.

+Joe King Great to hear! That's one of my goals; reaching people who wouldn't normally watch technical videos.

+Christian Colon-Fonseca Thanks mate. Glad you're enjoying them.

Thanks mate.

+John Doe Thanks mate.

John Doe Indeed, I'm not sure which I prefer the sketches or the maker stuff ... best maker site on UKposts!

Richard T Thanks mate. You've been around for a long time now. Back when I was in the double digit subs I think.

MickMake yup, I think I was 85th, but for comedic sake, I will say I was your 69th subscriber ... or 42 depending on how dirty your mind wants to be! :)

Thanks mate

+fouzai alaa Thanks. Yup I have a couple of videos planned with that in mind.

+Mastadex Alas I haven't had time to get these in before my holiday, but will be there on my return.

+judgeguilty Haha. Thanks mate, no I don't claim to be a standup comedian, just a dad with lots of dad jokes.

+Nick Sebring Long range Comms instead of using a mobile network. Chuck them out on a farm and running off solar and you can check your water troughs. Stick it into a high altitude balloon for telemetry. Put one in your car for logging your vehicle's movement without using GSM. Or use it as a vehicle tracker when it's stolen.

Thanks mate! Glad to have you aboard! LoRa really isn’t designed for huge amounts of data. Just really small packets every hour or once a day. You could theoretically transfer video over it, but you’d be annoying other people.

+wraithbone Yup, unfortunately I didn't have much time this week to do more testing. In a followup video I'll be including tests such as different data rates and other variables, but the maximum and minimum "air time" tests gives you the best and worst case scenarios.

MickMake cheers, keen to see that follow up.

Hi Andres, I sent a range of packet sizes from 1 byte to 1Kb - cycling through packet sizes in 1 byte increments. Sending a couple of packets a day, you should be able to last for at least several months on a coin cell and a small MCU.

+tsfcancerman Just two LoRa modules. You won't be able to pick up the LoRa transmission on a normal radio, but you could certainly use it to transfer whatever you want between two distant points.

+tsfcancerman But to answer your question... getting an SDR would be the best, along with a decent amplifier. You'd need a lot of money still and depending on your country they have very good methods for tracking down pirate radio stations. Most of them are situated off-shore to get around any legislation. Note: If you do this, then it's by your own choice. I don't support the setup of pirate radio in any way.

+altamiradorable Thanks mate. Maybe I should pay a visit to the zoo and record some footage there?!

These are smaller pitch headers. 1.27mm

+Connor Speers Well the far right is mA consumed in one hour, so you could take it as mAh. The far left column is mA consumed in how long the test was.

A mA is a measurement equal to 1 mC (milli-coulomb) of charge being transferred over the duration of 1 second, or 1 mC / s. Thus, a little unit math would allow one to conclude that a mAh = mA * h = mC / s * 3600 s = 3600 mC of charge (the seconds unit in the numerator cancels the seconds unit in the denominator, leaving only mC in the numerator). So mAh is a measurement of charge, whereas mA is a measurement of the rate of charge transfer. Batteries are technically rated for a particular voltage, with their energy capacity measured in watt-hours (1 Wh = 1 V * 1 A * 1 h). A battery with an advertised charge capacity of 2000 mAh (or 2 A * 1 h) operating at a constant 3.7 V would have an energy capacity of 3.7 V * 2 A * 1 h = 7.4 Wh. Say you used such a battery to power a device that operates at 3.7 V and has an average current draw of 80 mA (giving it a power rating of 3.7 V * 0.080 A = 0.296 W), you can calculate approximately how long the battery will be able to power the device by dividing 7.4 Wh / 0.296 W = 25 hours. This algorithm can be simplified (and often is) by eliminating voltage from the calculations if voltage is assumed to be constant. So then the equation becomes 2000 mAh / 80 mA = a theoretical 25 hours of operation. Your results tables are consistent with of this if the far right column is a measurement of the average rate of charge transfer (mA) during LoRa operation, but not if it's a measurement of total charge consumed (mAh). But if I'm wrong, let me know! Just trying to make sure I understand everything correctly. Big fan btw, never heard of LoRa before this video, so thanks for introducing me to something that has huge implications for the world of IoT (and beyond)!

+Connor Speers Yes that's right. I meant to say average mA consumed and didn't mean total. The voltage and current logger tended to skip over some of the 1 mS samples so I had to adjust for that when generating my average.

+Izzie Hi Izzie, yup I try to make projects that are actually useful. There'll be a lot more projects coming up soon. I have some big projects with LoRa, Sonoff, Orange Pis, and maybe a roof top antenna. ;-)

MickMake nice. looking forward to it.

MickMake Nice. I wonder if this could be powered, or at least the battery supplemented, with a solar panel.

Izzie Hmm. Now that's an idea!

MickMake Indeed. I suppose the microcontroller/SBC would be the hardest thing to power using solar power.

+Jhonattan Fredy Moreno Bernal You can get them everywhere. Have a look at my Roundup videos where there's one almost every week.

+Akarsh Agarwal The Orange Pi Zero and RPi Zero are probably your best bet. I haven't had a chance to look at the NanoPi Neo yet so not sure what it's like. Apart from that there's the embedded side; Arduinos, Teensy, etc.

MickMake thanks for the reply Mick. but the raspberry pi zero comes costlier than the pi 3. lol

Akarsh Agarwal Ah yes, the scalpers are charging a lot for them.

You could try the RPi Zero W. Its 5$ more than a normal Zero, but you can get it directly from thepihut.com

rupr thepihut also charge a good amount of shipping here to india.

This was the Log4USB. Made by an Ozzie fellow. Does a pretty decent job of it.

MickMake is it easy to use? Currently i'm doing research on current consumption of lora

During idle... yes, but transmitting/receiving it’ll draw a lot more.

I wonder if you could make the node idle for only a few microseconds every second to minimize power consumption then sleep?

Hi, there's a number of libraries in the Arduino IDE. I'll post my code up to my GitHub page soon.

MickMake thank you so much for your reply. I glad to hear that. actually i have found a library, but there is no example to use it. My sx127x is working at 470MHz not 433MHz

Can I have your GitHub Library/code please?

+altamiradorable Possibly. I would think that LoRa and WiFi would be too high a latency for classic RC, but the long range advantage of LoRa is appealing. You could use it for basic telemetry between a ground station and near-space balloon.

I was wondering the same thing but I'm guessing it is too low bandwidth for something like Mavlink. However, combined with something like a teensy, you might be able to use it as a failsafe last ditch long range "RTL" request system.

Would even a 20ms latency really matter much?

Ha ha. A little Angus.

+Wim Widdershins Yup it's always the fun bit. Well the whole thing is the fun bit.

Quite a few people have done this. Works well, but latency can be an issue. So you need to reduce the "air-time" as much as possible.

www.thethingsnetwork.org/wiki/LoRaWAN/Home

+EyesofNova There's essentially two different models; 433MHz and 838/900MHz, although you can change the frequency at runtime.

Absolutely! Would work well there. Line of sight would go up to 20kms.

MickMake thanks

+Daniel Rowe Ha ha. I'm a long time user of perl. Shame it was ditched in favour of Python and PHP.

+UFOhunter Yup, why not! You would only need one of them if it's low data rates, but two if you wanted to push through the 500k bandwidth.

But, Would I need a gateway, or just 2 or in my case, 3 modules will do? I would only need a gateway if I need connection to the internet on the other end? Right?

UFOhunter The best way would be to setup a LoRaWAN network, but you could do it with a straight peer to peer with several modules.

That's awesome. Will order 2 more. Thx

Sure!

I just found Arduino samples code -> bit.ly/2qsSMdQ

Michel Esc Ah, yup was just about to post. There's lots of examples in the Arduino IDE. My code didn't really add much to it.

It depends on what sort of telemetry. You can have telemetry between the earth and the moon, which would have high latency. You can configure LoRa to spend a lot of time "on air" which would increase latency, but increase distance. So the range you want is a big factor here.

MickMake my purpose is telemetry for drone, similar to 3DR telemetry. currently i'm developing a DIY flight controller using STM32F446RE. oh i got it, So sx127x should works for drone telemetry. i only need to send some string about 2Hz

DJ-EVARA yup, that'll work well.

+ProCactus That's right. It is *theoretical* after all. In reality you'd have to put the antenna up much higher to account for the curvature of the earth. WiFi? No, but I get called that before I've had a shower. ;-)

+ProCactus And yes, line of site would be a must!

+Fifury161 Well it's important to show you how I tested. There are many variables that affect the uptime.

Woohoo!

Just noticed your profile pic. Isn't that the mug shot from Doom?

MickMake Yes! well spotted, mate

Thought so. I'd seen it enough times. Too many times.