aarg:
Sure, you're looking at videos and forums. Those are not the places where detailed information is found. You don't need "someone". You need to do basic internet research, perhaps learn to read technical documents. Ultimately, the answers are there.
Stop with that. I have/had 3 windows with over 30 tabs each on this. It still was not clear because most of those have the same vague conceptual information repeated. So I turned to a forum to contact real people who have had real experience with it. If that is not YOU, as I must assume given your response, then simply don't post. Telling someone to effectively "google it" is telling someone that you don't know the answer either but feel a need to pretend as though you do to protect some sort of online credibility. It can not be overstated just how awful of a response that this.
srnet:
A UHF LoRa device can run at circa 60kbps.
A 2.4Ghz LoRa device can run at circa 200kbps.
If those data rates are 'very slow' what data rate do you think you need for your application ?
I don't believe those rates are slow either, however from my researching the subject more than one source has provided examples that would and would not be suitable for LoRa and one of those was situation monitoring parking spaces and suggested that LoRa may or may not be too slow for this with the specific example that it could "miss" someone pulling in and out of a space several times. To me that seems absurdly slow and seems to suggest that LoRa was only effective for applications where data was updated on the scale of days. Whereas I might need to register two events that are 300ms apart.
This is part of the reasoning for my questioning though really I would just like to setup something and test it myself.
noiasca:
Before judging something to be slow, please define what is fast in your understanding.
The transmission of an encrypted packet with sensor data containing several values might last 30ms. It can take far less and it could take far more time. It is depending on a lot of different parameters which are depending on your implementation.
May be you should start to read what LoRa is about. "LoRa (Long Range) is a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) protocol". LoRa uses license free bands and transmits at low power. Due to "low power" it fits well for battery powered sensors.
If you don't need "low power", if you don't need "long range", LoRa might not be the best option for your use case. You should describe your use case:
Why RF and not a cable?
how much data will be sent (bytes, kilobytes, megabytes) in one packet
in which intervals / total bytes per day?
distance between sensors and "central hub"
any obstacles between sensors and hub
I started this thread based off of my research which suggested that LoRa was slow and gave little more than high level concept. One of the examples I saw suggested that LoRa sensors monitoring parking spaces may not catch some one pulling in and out of a parking spot several times, which is a task that takes a few seconds I would think. Another example was soil humidity monitoring 2x per day and that this was perfect application for LoRa given the speeds. If that IS the case then LoRa seems to be only useful on something were you need updates on the scale hours to days. It left me wondering if there was some as of yet unknown aspect of it that made it so slow.
Anyway the sensors just need to send and event notification and a time stamp. Basically "ping HHMMSS" so its really a small amount of data but the events can fire several times within hundred ms of each other and I need to catch this. Maximum distance is < 200 meters open space.
Riva:
So if I understand correctly, the sensors just send events and do not need to receive values and the Arduino [controller] that receives the sensor events you will need to react to the sensor data and also accept commands from the user?
Will you need to apply the weight value to the individual sensor or will the weight be applied in the [controller].
The ESP32 and ESP8266 are different MCU's but similar, both support Wifi/bluetooth and have Arduino cores written for them so you can program them directly using the Arduino IDE. For my sensors I use LoRa32u4 boards as they suit low power, battery use out of the box.
Yes, the controller is what will do all the logic. So if I have 10 sensors I need to tell the arduino/controller to weight sensor 8 with this value and weight sensor 2 with this value, etc etc. It doesn't need to communicate anything to the sensor, just receive a notification and respond to it a timely manner, as close to "real time" as I can. Are you saying something like the LoRa32u4 has wifi, bluetooth, and LoRa?
