Hello everyone, and thank you for the kind feedback on my project! I'll be doing my best to address any questions that are asked here over the next couple days. Cheers!

I love when people much smarter than me do all the heavy lifting and then share it. ♥

Well done Andreas, very usefull. I am busy developing a greenhouse control system for home / agriculture use. I was initially tinkering with lorawan, but a bit put off by gateway cost for each site. This looks much better.

Now I have to learn how to parse all the data I'm going to generate, I'm not to hot with JSON but you and Timm have given me reason to study up a bit. Thank God for Steve Cope's tutorials. Thank you both.

Another great video, needs some further studies. Thanks for that! And my wife shouts HI from the background.. Have a gr8 Sunday and keep cool...

And another interesting project, I did learn a lot of new things again, Thanks! And so cool to see the ESP01 used again, these little wonders never get the attention the deserve;)

This was a great one! Thank you very much. Looks like another project I need to investigate!

Thank You! This is the same type of project I am currently designing for my renewable energy system.

unbelievable - I just finalized my project: "move out from WiFi to ESPnow". Similar approach (without LoRa) and observations: 1 - gateway: 1x ESP32 can do both: ESPnow and WiFi but not at the same time (no need for Serial), but: - ESPnow message sending takes < 15ms (from start modem till receive confirmation) and if 2 messages come at the same time you either do queue on gateway or discard second one - sending WiFi message from gateway to Home Assistant MQTT broker takes < 20ms - ESPnow sensor wakes up, collects data, sends message to GW: - ESP32 < 0.6s - ESP32-S2 < 0.2s much faster so less battery consumption - GW is always on, both way communication with HA - since ESPnow sensors only talk 1 way: to GW, no commands to them, so OTA on routine basis: once a day it connects to web server where new Firmware might be and if found, it will perform OTA 2- ESPnow sensors: - ESP32 - 180s hibernate (not deep sleep!), average current 4.5uA, work time: 0.6s with average 50mA, overall average consumption: 200uA - ESP32-s2- 180s hibernate (not deep sleep!), average current 22uA, work time: 0.2s with average 38mA, overall average consumption: 80uA so ESP32-S2 gives 16 months for 1000mAh battery - ESP32 "only" 5.5 months CONCLUSION: better to work fast (0.2s vs 0.6s) than sleep current (22uA vs 4.5uA) to save battery and for battery: no voltage - use MAX17048 to get real performance of the battery, i.e. from here: www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2512315.m570.l1313&_nkw=max17048&_sacat=0 EDIT: ESPnow in UNICAST re-sends data to receiver if failed and returns the real outcome (success if received and confirmed by receiver), in BROADCAST mode it only confirms "message sent" - irrespective if received (for obvious reasons: broadcast)

I made a similar project a few years ago, however I just used LoRa with two different configurations, long range but slow communication and short range but fast communication (LoRa can be configured for that too). The system was later integrated into the Home Assistant. It worked very well, only the Gateway (Raspberry pi with the Home Assistant) had access to the internet and the remaining devices (sensors and actuators) communicated to gateway through LoRa communication.

Very interesting video, I was about to try to do something similar myself for an apiary but didn't even know where to start. Thank you so much!

Very interesting project Andreas! Thank you. 2 years ago when I played with my Ebyte LoRa modules I tried to build a mesh network (those devices are cheap but can't use LoRaWAN). You set them on individual addresses and let them decide the communication paths by the dB level they measure. It worked well for a few but I assumed at that time the messages to keep the network alive might spam the airtime and didn't pursue it. This is a star network as you explained so a different idea. 👍

Interesting project! Andreas, thanks for sharing your insights. This will definitely remain on my watchlist. 😀

Excellent and very promising for the future !

Again a very interesting and as usual well-made video!

Great find, and informative video, thanks for sharing

Very good video and interesting project. Another thing to add to the to do list is security. This is becoming a great concern for all IOT.

Great video as always 👍 Thanks for sharing your expirence with all of us:-)

Excellent. You really do a great job!

Instant like! I hope you had fun on your motorcycle tour.

Clever! I really like ESPnow, has not occured to me to couple it with LoRa.

Beautiful! Something like this integrated with the Meshtastic project would be great, they're working on MQTT integration and would also provide that command and control capability 🙂

Dear Andreas, you are a Genius !!! Thanks very much !

Nice. I wrote this for my home network but it's nowhere near as nicely engineered as yours. I went complex with platformio and esp-idf freertos though... Maybe I should swap to yours! Very well made video as always :)

I live in a rural area and several of my neighbours passed retirement several years ago. With at least 15 minutes for fire department or ambulance to get here I've pondered some kind of "neighbour aid" system for a while, I'll be looking into this project. (Need to cover an area of about 1x2 km and 20 houses if all are interested)

Thanks, a wonderful lesson!

Super fun! Love it. Thanks!

Damn! I'm doing it (started 2 months ago). I thought how aren't people doing it.

Good one..clear explanation

I am soon building an ESPnow product for farms, so this video caught my eye :)

I'm building the exact same thing (for single grow room), but using just ESP between sensor modules, relay modules, and good old wifi routers for connecting to the internet. Though mine is on a small scale, so MQTT seems like it just adds indirection. I'm using a just sensor and controller modules, no repeater gateways. It's super simple and highly configurable using a regular computer web browser for the UI

I think localised LoRa would work fantastic for a high-head micro-hydro projects. Typically you have some long pipe going up a hill to a tank collecting water from a small stream. That could be a few hundred metres away. To maximise the energy produced, you'd have different sized nozzles at your turbine controlled by solenoid valves letting more or less water through while maintaining the full head pressure. A liquid level sensor on a LoRa board could be used to transmit the level in the tank at the top of the hill, opening more or less valves. Joe Malovich and Land to House have the right setups to integrate this sort of sensor.

you and your videos are the best

Hi @Andreas , Very nice video and very nice concept. I will be watching this space as I also switched from wifi to to espnow for all my sensors. Also, to let you know , it is possible to run both espnow and WiFi Station on the same ESP at the same time. I run my setup where an ESP01 (yes, you read it right !!) acts as a gateway to receive espnow messages and relays them to a MQTT server. It has been running without issues since the last 4-5 months. Forgot to mention that the only limitation on it is that the gateway ESP (and hence the other nodes) has to be on the same channel as the WiFi SSID which is just one extra piece of code to determine the same.

Can you make a follow up video with the latest update of the project, like the controller , and maybe some node red flows to that

this looks like it could have a lot of potential for (other than farms) managing large plots of land or woodland like for instance having thermal and smoke sensors using small solar panels and a battery scattered around woodland to make catching fires early easier. also could be cool building one of these networks out over a town or city that tracks roughly how busy areas are and also trafic using things like millimeter wave and radar sensors all going to a central node that publishes a heat map of an area that is independent of company like google or even independent of weather people are carrying phones

Thank you.

Wow, what a great tool :) The test setup runs smoothly so far. For a productive environment, it would be important that MQTT-credentials can be defined. Is this in the backlog?

What a great invention! I was wondering, can mqtt data from the gateway be sent with auto discovery format for home assistant?

Great video! 73! 🙂

Very cool!

Very nice I wish I would have seen this before I designed this system in micropython.

It's nice and solves problems, but limited to highly static building of the library by defines (No dynamic configuration of any). However if that's not a real case, it's not needed.

Good one

Hi @Andeas one more comment about the range of espnow Vs WiFi. I think practically it is not right to say that they both are the same. I know they operate on the same freq but then the connection process for both of them is vastly different due to which the range gets affected. To give an example, I have one ESP gateway for my espnow sensors placed on the first floor and all sensors from my roof (at G+2 level) to ground floor can easily reach it. The total time it takes for a sensor to wake up, do its thing and transmit is barely 80ms. Comparing this to a WiFi connection - even if there is weak signal present , it can never make a connection and hence considered out of range. So in my experience espnow has an excellent range as compared to WiFi.

Hi Andreas. Excellent video... Do you think it would be possible unify sensor values on gateway and send it to TTN gateway?

Great video! Indeed a diamond of a topic! Question: The esp-now protocol provides a callback function -- esp_now_register_send_cb() -- which returns an ACK. Can you opine on what that ACK can possibly tell the sending device and what it does NOT tell the sending device? Best.

Awesome!!

Very very usefull, but as you mentioned adding support to send commands to eg. run actuator, and msg recieved confirmation would complete this wounder full idea. We all should contribute in completing this project.

You can have wifi and espnow running at the same time. I do this in a esp32 motion detector talking to a esp32 light switch which is connected to the router as well.

Very interesting approach would like to find out if the data buffers would work for the the following. If you were to connect a GPS to a UART is there enough space to program it with the ability to parse the data and transmit only selected data i.e. position data? Would be nice for my hobby of flying model airplanes where sometimes things don't always work out as planned and you can spend days looking for them in the woods. Thanks

Hello Mr Spiess many thanks for info and advises. Actually i am in direct contact with Timm Bogner, he has quite a lot of experience with different hardware. Also his software repository is now capable to do bi-directional communication between nodes. I ordered new hardware and will do some additional tests soon. Best regards and a good time wishes Peter

I have a use case I am working on where I need to report sensor values along a river 5 miles. One sensor each mile. I think I needed to use a mesh network for the farthest node to connect to the gateway. Do you know if the repeater can also send its own sensor data with this approach?

In the examples at 9:40 & 9:50 where ESPnow is not being used, am I correct in assuming that just a LoRa32 board alone could be used as the gateway that bridges between LoRa and MQTT?

Dear Mr Spiess, great video again. Nice tutorial, i was testing it with my LoRa GPS Modules, time keeping works great so far ! For sensor gate detection, i do some tests with radar sensors, many thanks for those tutorials too! As you mentioned it, there are two restrictions in this kind of sensor-network: no bi-directional communication with commands and no acknowledgement of the correct delivery of a data package. The time gates have also the task to communicate with the competitors , when the can start the run. Do You have any hints or ideas, about to solve this ? Many thanks and best regards, Peter

Impressive! I wonder if it is possible to use esp-now directly on a sonoff basic.

Good video

Nice video again with nice framework for low power network. Can you please provide some power profile data for sensor node device? I do not have Nordic power profiler which you have. Thank you.

Nice, I developed a very similar comunication protocol for a Wide area sensor network base don LoRa only. I’m using an apikey to discard all the messages not generated from my network’s node. How do you manage this problem? Do you encript your data? Your videos are always inspiring. Thanks

Andreas, I am interested in capturing LoRa packets. Specifically, I am interested in trying to merge the existing LoraTap code in Wireshark into the radiotap code which already has mechanisms to handle pretty much all the info that can be captured from LoRa phys and chips. That will involve a capture tool that can generate the correct radiotap header etc. Do you have any recommendations on which LoRa environments I should purchase to get started on this?

Grate project and great idea.How to send analog data from place where is no wifi by Lora ebyte UART E22 or E32 series to esp 8266 or esp32 to manual switch relays on and off?

I am doing the same, but with nRf24 in mesh config... with MQTT gateway from nRF to Wifi. nRF mesh is pretty cool, since it 'configures' it self when nodes come and go or move around.

Thank you very much for your video. Just have a couple questions, Gateway(4) can be either ESP8266, ESP32 or LoRa? and also in your example Gateway(4) communicates to Gateway(5)/ESP01 via a serial connection and from the ESP01 to the router via WIFI? thank you!

I hope my question does not sound too stupid: I'm finally back from sea (working as a merchant mariner) and trying to better understand this whole concept. Everytime I leave, I miss so much and forget a lot. I am trying to come up with a way to transmit sensor data in real time from an amateur (hobby) rocket to a ground station. I'd like to be able to receive sensor data from altimeter(s), GPS, temperature, camera video (possibly), etc. So, I am wondering if this application could fill the bill. ANd, I suppose this is at the 2.4 gHz area. Am I right?

Hi Andreas, I don't understand how you can configure the same gateway to interpret LoRa messages and also ESP_NOW. Please, could you give me a hint with that?

Hi Andreas, Did you ever use the W-MBUS in your projects ?

I think the better solution will be a ZigBee network sensors are production level and not DIY, Routers can be powered externally with solar panels. And all sensors would use the same protocol. It will be more costly but with less caviets.

I like to see more of ESP NOW and its limitations. It says max peers is 20, but is that only for the sender to send to max 20 devices or does it also affect a receiver which wants to get data from more than 20 devices? I only have to add a peer to the sender. Documentation is sparse on this. Also encryption limits that even further and example code is even less available.

Valeu!

Hi Andreas, how can we make use use of old WIFI antennas to detect radio signals and track them on our 💻?

You can use both ESPNOW and WiFi at the same time. I use it in my ESPNOW weather station. The trick is both the WiFi and ESPNOW must use the same channel, and when my AP restarts, it just picks a random channel, so when my ESPNOW to WiFi gateway reconnects to WiFi, it is no longer listening on the same channel as the weather station is transmitting on. My solution is to have the gateway broadcast an SSID (which contains the channel info), and every 1/2 the weather station looks for that SSID, and sets the channel to what the gateway is currently using. I could have just hard coded my channel in the AP, gateway and weather station, but I like to avoid hard coding configurations like that.

Do the ESPs use less power than for WiFi while they‘re running LoRa and/or ESPnow? I had the impression that the high power consumption for WiFi comes not only from the use of the radio (which is presumably no different for the other protocols), but also from what‘s required for WiFi communication - some messages that have to be exchanged with the AP, and a bit of waiting. If LoRa or ESPnow are simpler protocols (I have no idea if they are), then there could be less power consumption and longer battery life.

Do I understand correctly that it is not possible to send a switching command to a remote microcontroller over LoRa. Why is that?

Can I use ESP-NOW to listen "non-stop"? I want to control it via alexa. So I am looking to have it working as a receiver.

interesting great potential

Sir can we create a similar network and send not just sensor data but low size images with espnow or some other method without wifi ? Maybe I am getting too ambitious ?

Hi Andreas, i love your videos, i have learned a lot watching them. I need your help. I have tried to use an EPS32 to control the start and stop of an AC motor, with a MOC3041 and a TRIAC BT13, but the ESP32 is resets itself just when the motor is started or stopped. In the circuit I'm also using a load cell and an oled 0.91" display. Could you please give me an idea of why the ESP32 is resets itelf. Could I sent you the circuit via e-mail?

You're on the right track. Now rediscover UWB and ATM and bingo...you're there...and even way beyond there.

Great job , I succeed to build a couple of Sensor but i can't use the data because I can't split the json format with node red , any one help me to do it ? Thanks

I tried to use Espnow but the signal was very poor. Only for couple meters. Does anybody know how to fix this?

Why use ESPNow for this farmer scenario given that LoRa can do short range too? Thanks!

With your examples I cannot connect esp8266 as mqtt_gateway with another esp8266 as UART_gateway. Is there anything to change in the code? Very good work, I give you my D's

2:10 I don't remember if you've tested the range in a video. But I've seen others reach 500m easily with ESP-Now in LR mode. I don't get why he is using two solutions, did he need the higher bandwidth of ESP-Now? Or could he use LoRa for all sensors, simplifying things?

8:44 ESP-Now and WiFi can work on the same board. They have to be on the same channel. It's easy to configure a channel on an ESP device but configuring a WiFi channel depends upon Admin access. I have used ESP Soft-AP as a WiFi and set the ESP-Now and WiFi channel. It works flawlessly. If you are going to use a WiFi connected to the internet, even being on the same channel it is possible that packets get lost. I will try to fix this issue, if it works I'll tell you.

I use one node as gateway, that also does WiFi. I have a D1 Mini Pro in my mailbox, which sends the ESP-NOW message to my gateway. When my gateway has received a message, it will restart the ESP, connect to WiFi, send MQTT message, reboot the ESP, and go back into ESP-NOW gateway state. Whole process takes ~3 seconds.

Great video, as usual. I am a heavy user of ESP-NOW, as compared to standard WiFi+MQTT it saves a lot of battery time, 0.5s vs 5s wake-up to sleep time, in my case. The ESP-receiver and MQTT gateway are on a power supply, of course. It does not seem popular, who knows why… I can confirm that a single ESP mcu cannot work on both ESP-NOW and WiFi networks, or at least I could not manage to do so. 😅

hey how about Swarm technologies?sounds cool to me..

What is the failover method? If an ESP or lora goes down what takes over?

Thanks for another interesting video Andreas. I used the MySensors project to do this job. It was based on the NRF24 for short range (2.4GHz) and also can do LoRa with the RF95 type boards at both 433 MHz and 868/915MHz. One advantage of MySensors is that is is a tree network (relays) and it can do actuator commands etc. I like ESP-Now but I reckon BLE is actually better as most smartphones are equipped for BLE these days so they can be included in the sensor network as well as a sensor and/or a controller if you feel like creating an android app for it! Patrick

Congratulations on your videos always well made and very well explained. A few years ago I made a lorawan network with a gateway on raspberry, it always worked well, but with the upgrade to v3 I had several problems. I was thinking of switching to a local Lora network, reusing the old sensors based on Arduino Micro AT328 and Wemos D1 (ESP8266) boards with RFM95 Your video may have helped me migrate from Lorawan to Lora / ESPnow, recreating a local network and sending data to raspberry + node.red

hanks I'm working on some espnow blind motors as needs to be battery powered WIFI is to power hungry

@Andreas: ESPNow and Wifi run togeather... To be exact ESPNow simple usese Wifi "manufacturer message" packets. The only problem i discovered so far is the Wifi Channel must be the same for Wifi and ESP Now receive (Channel of Wifi AP rules here).

Cool and very usefull, and i will this idea Test for my bee hive Project. Du you have an idee to use modbus ?

Great video and an exciting project. I was wondering if Andreas or others could provide a hand. I've recently made a weather station project consisting of an IR, light sensor, and ESP32 MCU to monitor sky conditions, especially skies impacted by light pollution, a type of Sky Quality Meter. The plan is to place this several of these SQM sensors to monitor the sky quality in our local, national park and measure the developing light pollution, which you may already know impacts flora and fauna. That way, factual data can be recorded and presented to the local authorities to take action. As you can imagine, the sensors are needed to be placed in remote areas in different places where Wifi is not available, and Lora seems to provide that solution. Any help or ideas is highly appreciated. 😊

So basically EnigmaIOT but no encryption?

why is this video unlisted :(

Now, how long will it take for 1 byte addressing to become a bottleneck?

Hi Andreas and fans, I need help, my wife is hard of hearing mainly in the low frequencies l am having problems with my damaged vocal chords and my voice is husky. She is unable to use a hearing aid because of a nasal problem. My idea is to raise the frequency of my voice frequency and volume level, while talking or change the acoustics somehow. I am 83 and my wife is 91.

They should talk to the MySensors people. There's at least 75% overlap.

hi andreas is there an email where i can contact you? its a project im working on and i need assistance, im currently in high school and its a bit difficult to understand some of the videos explaining radio frequencies and electromagnetic fields etc. i was wondering if you have an email because your videos are the easiest to understand , ty