I've been developing my own outdoor project for a year or so now. The project monitors and manages valves and sensors for my outdoor garden. It currently uses LoRa, nRF52840 chip, a LiFePO4 battery, and solar charging. All of the code is written in Arduino and uses the Adafruit Bootloader.
The reason I moved away from LiPo was that I wanted peace of mind when charging the batteries unattended (LiPo is just dangerous IMO for outdoor anything).
I currently have different boards that monitor soil moisture, temperature, and water flow. I also manage water valves as well (DC latching). What I've discovered is that all of the core hardware functionality is common to all of my boards, so I'm currently working on a "core" board that can be used in my project.
Having said all of that, I was wondering if the community would be interested in using an Arduino compatible board like the one I've mentioned? I ask because I need it regardless; however, if there's enough interest then I may make this open source and see if the community would want it.
What's nice about this board is that Adafruit has put in a lot of time/effort to make a very nice BLE stack on top of the nRF52 chips, and the chip itself is very powerful and also low power. The combination of LoRa, BLE, solar charging, and LiFePO4 I personally think would make outdoor projects a little easier... but then again you can always use breakouts with an AVR.
Anyways... any thoughts?