Do you need LoRa for LONG RANGE Sensor Networks? Locally-Hosted Setup w/ Chirpstack

День тому

Do you like sensors and data collection as much as me, but need a solution for longer range than you can get with WiFi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, etc? Maybe you should take a look at LoRa, and the LoRaWAN network topology.
In this video, I walk through what LoRa and LoRaWAN are, how you can setup a LoRaWAN gateway and self-hosted Chirpstack cloud for your own home network, and eventually get sensor data all the way across my LoRaWAN network and into Home Assistant!
LoRaWAN Gateway:
(US 915Mhz): shrsl.com/4gs7v
(EU 868Mhz): shrsl.com/4gs7w
My SW Fork: github.com/apalrd/LR1302_LoRaWAN
Chirpstack LoRaWAN Installation Page:
www.chirpstack.io/docs/gettin...
(They also have a Home Assistant Addon if you are into that)
LoRaWAN Node Board (w/ RP2040): shrsl.com/4gs80
LoRaWAN Node Board (Node Only, Needs MCU): shrsl.com/4gs81
My RA-08H Examples: github.com/apalrd/LoRa_RA08
All Elecrow LoRa Products: shrsl.com/4gs83
The Sensor I Bought from Dragino (they have a ton of LoRaWAN sensors): www.dragino.com/products/temp...
Warning YoLink produces Home Automation products using LoRa, but they do not support standards-compliant LoRaWAN, despite being built on LoRaWAN. So you cannot use them with your own network.
Support me on Ko-Fi if you enjoy my content and find it useful:
ko-fi.com/apalrd
Feel free to chat about my upcoming projects on Discord!
/ discord
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
01:00 - Hardware
02:45 - LoRa
05:15 - Gateway
09:19 - LoRaWAN
13:36 - Chirpstack
21:54 - Devices
26:57 - Custom Nodes
33:39 - Home Assistant
38:52 - Conclusion

КОМЕНТАРІ: 44

@KeithHanlan Місяць тому

I think that I have found another project to keep me busy when I retire. Absolutely fascinating.

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

Home Assistant on the whole is plenty to keep anyone busy

@DylanClements98 Місяць тому

I swear every time I’m thinking about something, you make a video about it. Great work as always.

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

Enjoy :)

@gburkett05 Місяць тому

Another fantastic video! Wanted to say just after 33mins there's lat/long on-screen. Don't want you to dox yourself!

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

Thanks for letting me know! I thought I caught all of those.

@drivinginchina4598 Місяць тому

What a great video.

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

Glad you like it!

@PuputDaniPrasetyoAdi 29 днів тому

Very Fast explanation, but this incredible

@CTWilliams89 Місяць тому

I think you'd appreciate the reticulum project I recently found it and think it is really really neat lol

@OskarHersch Місяць тому

I like that too, but WireGuard can be used in same way, and you have it little bit simplified. Both work over different media, even over DMR ! Because in Unixy you can pipe anything to anything. Reticulum is awesome for big groups where people do not always have to know each other.

@l0gic23 25 днів тому

Your a pretty cool dude.

@UrosGolob0x55 Місяць тому

Few years ago I did some subghz 868/915 zigbee development. 600m was the limit with our setup.

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

My experience with Zigbee has been poor, but I think it's because so many manufacturers bend the specs and there are incompatibilities. Z-wave just dosen't have those kinds of device specific incompatibility issues.

@wildekek Місяць тому

Nicely explained! I started monitoring the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens using a few LoRa sensors and Home Assistant with the MQTT sensor integration and it works pretty darn sweet. The only drawback so far is that it gets quite messy quickly since the HA yaml config file gets a ton of duplication for all the sensor data. Not sure how to fix that problem yet without making a ChirpStack integration.

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

It might be possible to write a Chirpstack integration that just generates Home Assistant MQTT discovery entities, or maybe have a script that does that periodically. Basically, you can take the yaml configuration and publish it over MQTT to a well-known topic path, so software that's HA aware can push its own configuration over MQTT and HA will discover and add it automatically.

@wildekek Місяць тому

@@apalrdsadventuresThanks! Yes you're right, doing it the other way round and creating a ChirpStack Integration that pushes the HA MQTT discovery is probably the most elegant way to handle this.

@orrtjorvieinarsson4477 Місяць тому

nice. thx

@shephusted2714 Місяць тому

do a followup when you add more devices

@kritikusi-666 Місяць тому

Cool. I still don't know where the LoRa WAN module is stationed. Is that outside somewhere...perhaps I missed the diagram on how it was setup. Cool project regardless. LoRas for everything nowadays.

@tezlallc2900 17 днів тому

Great video! Any reason this wouldn't work with a RPI 3 B+ ? Do you run Home Assistant on the RPi and push the cloud data back down for to RPi for display?

@apalrdsadventures 17 днів тому

It should work fine on the 3B+. I'm not sure if the Pi 3 would be powerful enough for Home Assistant. I don't run HA on a Pi, just different radios.

@Matt-kabob Місяць тому

I like your Linux is Awesome shirt… where did you get it?

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

It's from vkc.sh (Veronica Explains)

@zyghom Місяць тому

bloody hell: snow? I did not see it for last 25 years ;-)

@fuzzlabrador Місяць тому

ah lora....ive set on the first row before

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

So you probably know all of the LoRaWAN gateway options then

@l0gic23 25 днів тому

@@apalrdsadventurescrazy youtubers just watch but dont rake notes...

@SuperEuro Місяць тому

Is it possible to repeat such a project on a RAK2287 Semtech SX1302?

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

My board also uses the SX1302 (it's an 8ch LoRaWAN gateway), so it's just different software. Looks like RAK provides Pi OS images which support both Semtech UDP and Chirpstack, so yeah it should work the same way.

@pbrigham Місяць тому

I just wonder why you didn't went with WIFI HaLow, still gives you at least 1 to 2 Km of range, much faster speeds, and can seamless be integrated in any existing network infrastructure.

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

Mostly because there are so few devices that natively support HaLow. Most of the HaLow devices I've found are either bare chipsets or HaLow to Ethernet bridges, not complete products.

@pbrigham Місяць тому

@@apalrdsadventures well, I pick up a couple of this for less than 50 bucks not expecting much of it, I'm only using one as an access point, dam, this thing gives me internet form 2 km from the house! 16 Mbits at 2 kms! :), I quite impressed by it so far.

@kirksteinklauber260 Місяць тому

Why you didn’t consider a Mikrotik LoRAWAN router instead the raspberry pi?

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

Mikrotik's LoRaWAN gateways cost more, that's basically it.

@Mr.Leeroy Місяць тому

audio needs a 6db boost

@deanbell5164 Місяць тому

Is the MQTT server/broker running on Proxmox, is it a VM or CT? Is the MQTT server/broker mosquitto? Is Home Assistant a VM or CT in your setup? Great presentation.

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

I am using the MQTT server I already use for Home Assistant, which in my case is Mosquitto in a CT. Home Assistant is a VM (HA OS). I have been using MQTT longer than I've been using Home Assistant (I started with MQTT + Node-Red), so I didn't use the HA OS addon, but that's also a good choice if you are using HA OS. You can run Mosquitto in the same CT as Chirpstack (or on the Pi directly, if you run Chirpstack on the Pi) if you'd like. It doesn't really matter who hosts the MQTT broker.

@deanbell5164 Місяць тому

Have you setup the MQTT broker (Mosquitto) for HA, to avoid that single point of failure issue?

@apalrdsadventures Місяць тому

Not with redundant brokers. All of my HA stuff is running on Proxmox, and I have a separate Proxmox system for the 'important' stuff that I don't mess with regularly.