Has anybody had experience with creating a mesh network!!
Can you please advise if I am on the right track before I purchase. I need to monitor some rural sites (eg water tank levels) and would like to access this monitoring back at home/office to create a web based monitoring system.
The sites are at varying distances up to 5.7kms and not all line of site. I believe that if I create mesh network it will overcome the line of site issue.
If I were to use the RFM95 LoRa 915Mhz (Australia) breakout with an Arduino UNO at each site will I be able to create a mesh network and in turn connect to the internet.
Will code for this be a nightmare or are there some appropriate tutorials out there already
Great project! There are several open source mesh network projects, including an Arduino/ESP8266 example.
Pick a couple, look through them and decide if it looks worthwhile to adapt them to the chosen device. This example looks promising, but a high priority would be to replace the crash-causing String processing code with reliable C-string character arrays and functions.
But first, get a single transmitter/receiver pair working to your satisfaction.
If there are Lora gateways in the area you can transmit data directly to The Things network (note the data limits per day) and then using HTTP integration POST to a database
If there are no local Gateways siting one at a central point in the area could work (Lora range depends on local conditions sich as tress, buildings, etc)
An alternative could be to build a mesh of Lora peer to peer devices and use a GSM modem to transmit data to your database
You probably need to experiment
the APC220 devices could be an alternative to using LoRa32u4 RFM95 modules to build a mesh - cost seems to be similar - Lora is claimed to have greater range
Once you have the mesh built how will you transmit the data to your database?
I suggest some onsite experiments
A Pro Mini is quite happy to drive a $4 LoRa module.
APC220s are $40 and LoRa32u4 RFM95s $35.
For remote sensors and the like its usually a good idea to use a bare bones ATMega328 setup, that way you can be sure to get the sleep current down to a handful of uA.
Despite that I am new in arduino projects I know you can build mesh networks using XBEE chips. There is even a Xbee mesh kit sold in my country.
Is there a reason that nobody suggested this? Am I missing something about this technology??
You can find a paper discussing about how to use a microprocess (possible to implement on Arduino) to design a LoRa Mesh Wireless Network
Huang-Chen Lee, Kai-Hsiang Ke, Monitoring of Large-Area IoT Sensors using a LoRa Wireless Mesh Network System: Design and Evaluation, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation & Measurement, accepted, Mar 2018.