I have a new Uno R4 wifi and I am becoming familiar with Arduino wireless. In my learnings I came across LoRa as another long range lower comms protocol that seems like it might work well with Arduino and sensing. I def want something that will have long range that wifi to operate some projects wireless but at greater distances.
My research revealed a lot about LoRa and LoRawan and seemed like back in 2016 era (when IOT really broke onto the scene) that The Things Network was started as large scale public access. In My area near Ottawa Canada there are several TTN sites but they all look like they are inactive and have been for some years. I reached out to contacts and got zero replies.
Can anyone comment on whether TTN went anywhere and are they operating commercial LoRa IOT systems around?
I have used TTN with Arduino devices here in Australia but you are at the mercy of the availability of a local gateway, unless you want to set up your own which is a whole different level.
Personally I have found point to point LoRa (not LoRaWAN) more useful but that is because my projects have been device-to-device rather than device-to-internet. But it has worked very well; simple to set up and completely reliable.
Thank you. I only got into Arduino a year ago, so I dont know the history of a lot of this. I worked for GE Aviation about the time TTN seemed to emerge (2015 ish) and GE couldn't shut up about the coming IOT revolution, but now in 2024 I am not so sure anything really happened.
If one wanted to communicate with an Arduino device at a distance and low bit rate, are there any other systems to do this easily, other that LoRa and LoRawan?
There may be more Helium gateways than TTN, always worth checking if there are active ones near you. There are certainly more Helium than TTN near me.
I’m not sure of the pricing model with Helium. I think it’s free for some limited usage.
There isn’t really a better solution than LoRa for ultra low power, very low bandwidth and long distance. It’s really exactly what it’s designed for and the electronic devices on the market seem to work very well in my experience.
Perfect I will check into it. I have the sense Helium was associated with crypto maybe? And this was controversial maybe? I dont want that I just want LoRa wan access eventually for a future project with low bandwidth.
It’s possible to build a kind of pseudo-gateway of your own with a device like the ESP32-based Heltec Lora Wifi. This can simultaneously receive Lora comms from remote devices while connecting to the internet over wifi.
This is obviously far, far less sophisticated than LoraWan but might be suitable for simple, non-mission-critical hobbyist applications. I built a water meter reader that uses a battery-powered MKR 1310 to transmit the meter value over LoRa to the Heltec “base station” which sends it to the Arduino Cloud using my home wifi. It works pretty well.
Helium was marketed to cash in on people’s greed by making them think they would earn lots of money by hosting a gateway and getting paid for every byte their gateway passed on.
But there was never going to be enough traffic to make any money out of it, so it has kind of died off I think. But there are still a surprising amount of gateways active, at least near me.
The risk is probably that the owner of the nearest one to you gets sick of paying for the power and pulls the plug.
75 feet should be no problem with basic WiFi antenna at both ends, provided you have clear line of sight.
But if you have walls or trees blocking line of sight, these will reduce the range significantly. Antenna with higher gain, maybe even directional antenna, will help to increase the range.
If you can arrange that your WiFi router is placed on a windowsill, ideally an upstairs window, with a view of the yard, there is a good chance the Arduino can connect.
An external antenna with a higher gain for the Arduino would also help. I'm not familiar with R4 WiFi and do not know if an external antenna can be connected. I use Wemos D1 mini for many projects. With these, an external antenna cannot be connected, so when I need to do that, I upgrade to a Wemos D1 Mini Pro, which has a tiny socket for an external antenna. It is necessary to move a very small resistor on the mini pro to enable the external antenna connector, using a soldering iron with a very small bit.
Thank you, great info. The idea of putting a wifi xmitter in a window is a good one. My main one is in the center of the house, but I assume you can get repeater units to place elsewhere in the home for better home coverage although I never actually considered that before.
Long term I am thinking of building Halloween monsters etc in the yard that more or less operate autonomously but where you can send a few command bytes occasionally to mix up how the monster behaves. Stuff like that.
Can your smartphone connect to your router when you are in the yard? How far from the house can you go? There is an app called WiFi Analyser which you can use to measure the signal strength. When it falls below about -80dBm, you are out of range. However, an Arduino with a high-gain external antenna will probably get a stronger signal than your smartphone, so a connection may still be possible.
When I am in the front of my house where the router is more distant I cant get wifi on my phone. IN the back I can for maybe 30 feet, but its closer to the router.
