I am looking to buy a pair of LORA transcievers so that I can send and receive messages to/from my 76 year old father who lives 300m away on the same level of ground. I will write the program to work on each and at the minute I am only asking about the hardware.
Any suggestions of a device that I can buy 2 of and work with any Arduino like Uno/Mega/Nano/Leonardo?
I’m asking for help from those with experience of devices that work.
Thanks for any help.
The specifications for LORA will tell their capacity regarding distance but watch out for remarks regarding obstructing hinders like walls, hills etc.
The simplest way is to buy the Lora radio already mounted on the esp32. They come in a nice case and antenna is builtin. 300M line of sight is easy.
Thanks for replying. I don’t know esp32, is it similar to Arduino? How can I program it?
The Arduino IDE is for both Arduino and esp boards as well as a few more. Here is the Canadian Amazon link to the radios.
LINK
Just an FYI, here are some of the boards the Arduino IDE can program. If you are at that level of experience, may I suggest you get the Arduino Cookbook to learn from, and iof you want to go beyond assembling kits and do some real building the Electronics Cookbook is also a good resource. Of course that is just a start, I usually recommend 3 to 5 books on each skillset.
Thanks, I am a decent programmer, I would like to get some devices in the UK that work with Arduino boards, because I have so many.
Ok, ihn that case you will need EU LORA frequency, mine is different in Canada. Any board that has WiFi should work with LORA. Check the librarylproperties to see what architectures are supported. See if there are any Arduino based LORA kits. Here is the Arduino docs o LORA LINK
Thanks, But I am still waiting on the experience of someone from the UK, or a link I can buy from UK, because there are so many LORA devices that I cannot decipher if they will work with Arduino or not :-).
@matalog Have you looked into meshtastic? This might meet your needs for comms with your father.
Whether or not you use meshtastic, a lot of people use the Heltec Lora Wifi V3 development board. This is an ESP32-based board that can be programmed from the Arduino IDE. They have built in LoRa and Wifi radios and an OLED display and there are working examples in the library that you can easily copy and adapt. I have a system using these on water meters on my property. You just have to pick the right frequency version for your country.
The Arduino MKRWAN 1310 is also a nice unit for LORA if you want to stick with Arduino products. A bit pricey though.
Just search amazon UK or maybe just change the .ca to whatever UK is. It sounds like you need to study how LORA works first then you may understand what you need to get a board talking to a LORA chip or board.
A lot of LoRa modules use an SPI bus to communicate with an Arduino. There are also ‘LoRa modules’ that communicate with an Arduino via a Serial UART connection.
I have been working with LoRa since 2014, cannot recall a LoRa module that does not work with an Arduino ……….
Incidentally the first of the LoRa long distance stuff started in the UK (South Wales) in 2014.
try a Amazon search for Heltec LoRa V3
e.g. ESP32 LoRa V3 Development Board with 868MHz Antenna
try RadioLib examples File>Examples>RadioLib>SX126x>SX126x_Transmit_Interrupt and Receive_Interrupt
