What boards do you have?
- ESP32: half a dozen. waste of money. none of them respond to the IDE. I tried every trick on the web
- MEGA2560: half a dozen. I need many pins for my projects
- UNO: 3 or 4. good for one task. One is a GPS / RTC / LoRa node that is used only for testing LoRa concentrators. I may put an ethernet hat on it and see if it functions as an NTP server.
- NANO: a dozen. essentially just a smaller UNO. they may end up used as LoRa node intrusion sensors, and add a weather sensor per node as a heartbeat signal to know they are functional if nobody enters the property through that gate..
- RPi 3B - with a Dragino LoraHat and a built in UPS. The LoRa aspect of the LoraHat is about as useful as a Top Fuel Trabant. Making this into a GPS based NTP server. The 3B is not fast enough to watch YouTube videos or play back video files. Like the UNO and NANO, give it one task.
- RPi 4: For those not yet into LoRa: The LoRa Concentrator is a device that listens to multiple radios on random channels and makes the transmitted sensor outputs available on the SPI interface. I have not yet found one that works. A LoRa Concentrator is the front end of a LoRaWAN server, without the WAN and the need for a permanent WAN connection.
- one RPI4 with a Turta Lora Hat and a built in UPS. testing this as a Lora Concentrator. If it works I will move my Large Property Perimeter Monitor from a Mega to this. the LPPM is what most people would call a burglar alarm, but it goes way beyond that.
- a second RPI4 in the form of a RAK7244 LoRaWAN server. Nobody in LoRaWAN land can understand when you say "I don't want to route my data through an external server on the ninnynet, have the external server process input and return commands, have the RPi4 process those commands, and perform tasks totally dependent on a ninnynet connection, in house. I want to eliminate dependency on the ninnynet and do everything here on my workbench". everybody in LoRaWAN land acts like that is the most foolish thing they ever heard. nobody makes Concentrator firmware that makes RAK7244 LoRa radio data available to the RPi internally. Chirpstack has Concentrator firmware, but that firmware has no interface directly from the radio to SPI. It also has no apt or pip or browser, so you can't upload Python or any other software.
- I may buy a third RPi4 and add a Dragino PG1301 as yet another Concentrator. Before you ask: Tin roof. It is easier to have multiple Concentrators in various corners networked together than it would be to put one antenna ( and lightning rod ) on the high roof, and send that signal down 25 yards of RG-174 to one Concentrator.
- One RPi Zero W, with yet another built in UPS and a Waveshare SX1262 Concentrator hat. This one will receive the same sensor inputs as the LPPM, but treat them differently. This one will switch the video to my CCTV system so the sensors determine which video goes to my biggest video monitor and it's associated DVR. If a delivery truck comes down the driveway, the video should show, and the DVR should record:
- the telephoto driveway cam,
- then the front porch cam,
- then the front door cam,
- back to the front porch cam,
- then the telephoto driveway cam again.
I don't want all that processing slowing down the LPPM. The switching will be handled by I2C to 16 GPIO pin modules, controlling the original MEGA 2560 LPPM, repurposed as a video switcher.
I am planning on using RPi Zero Ws as my default microcontroller in the future. ESP32s have been a major disappointment in both the IDE and the number of available pins departments. LoRa, if I can get a Concentrator to work, should get me past that requirement.
the answer to the predictable question: when the weather goes sour. Mid October is inside operation weather in NM. Right now, 85 degree days, getting the monster engine in the baja bug is priority one.