430 ESPnow and LoRa Network (incl. Repeaters and Gateways). A TTN replacement?

Can I use ESP-NOW to listen "non-stop"? I want to control it via alexa. So I am looking to have it working as a receiver.

hey how about Swarm technologies?sounds cool to me..

Can you make a follow up video with the latest update of the project, like the controller , and maybe some node red flows to that

Do I understand correctly that it is not possible to send a switching command to a remote microcontroller over LoRa. Why is that?

What a great invention! I was wondering, can mqtt data from the gateway be sent with auto discovery format for home assistant?

Great job , I succeed to build a couple of Sensor but i can't use the data because I can't split the json format with node red , any one help me to do it ? Thanks

Please, help me...!!

Hi Andreas, I don't understand how you can configure the same gateway to interpret LoRa messages and also ESP_NOW. Please, could you give me a hint with that?

Very nice I wish I would have seen this before I designed this system in micropython.

Hello Mr Spiess
many thanks for info and advises. Actually i am in direct contact with Timm Bogner, he has quite a lot of experience with different hardware. Also his software repository is now capable to do bi-directional communication between nodes. I ordered new hardware and will do some additional tests soon. Best regards and a good time wishes Peter

Dear Mr Spiess, great video again.
Nice tutorial, i was testing it with my LoRa GPS Modules, time keeping works great so far ! For sensor gate detection, i do some tests with radar sensors, many thanks for those tutorials too! As you mentioned it, there are two restrictions in this kind of sensor-network: no bi-directional communication with commands and no acknowledgement of the correct delivery of a data package. The time gates have also the task to communicate with the competitors , when the can start the run. Do You have any hints or ideas, about to solve this ?
Many thanks and best regards, Peter

Interesting project! Andreas, thanks for sharing your insights. This will definitely remain on my watchlist. 😀

I think localised LoRa would work fantastic for a high-head micro-hydro projects. Typically you have some long pipe going up a hill to a tank collecting water from a small stream. That could be a few hundred metres away. To maximise the energy produced, you'd have different sized nozzles at your turbine controlled by solenoid valves letting more or less water through while maintaining the full head pressure. A liquid level sensor on a LoRa board could be used to transmit the level in the tank at the top of the hill, opening more or less valves.

Joe Malovich and Land to House have the right setups to integrate this sort of sensor.

hanks I'm working on some espnow blind motors as needs to be battery powered WIFI is to power hungry

It's nice and solves problems, but limited to highly static building of the library by defines (No dynamic configuration of any).

However if that's not a real case, it's not needed.

With your examples I cannot connect esp8266 as mqtt_gateway with another esp8266 as UART_gateway. Is there anything to change in the code?

Very good work, I give you my D's

I hope my question does not sound too stupid: I'm finally back from sea (working as a merchant mariner) and trying to better understand this whole concept. Everytime I leave, I miss so much and forget a lot. I am trying to come up with a way to transmit sensor data in real time from an amateur (hobby) rocket to a ground station. I'd like to be able to receive sensor data from altimeter(s), GPS, temperature, camera video (possibly), etc.
So, I am wondering if this application could fill the bill. ANd, I suppose this is at the 2.4 gHz area. Am I right?

Thank you very much for your video. Just have a couple questions, Gateway(4) can be either ESP8266, ESP32 or LoRa? and also in your example Gateway(4) communicates to Gateway(5)/ESP01 via a serial connection and from the ESP01 to the router via WIFI? thank you!

It's a shame that MQTT-SN never took off. Possibly because people kept reinventing simpler versions of it.

They should talk to the MySensors people. There's at least 75% overlap.

Beautiful! Something like this integrated with the Meshtastic project would be great, they're working on MQTT integration and would also provide that command and control capability 🙂

Wow, what a great tool :) The test setup runs smoothly so far. For a productive environment, it would be important that MQTT-credentials can be defined. Is this in the backlog?

Great video!
Indeed a diamond of a topic!
Question: The esp-now protocol provides a callback function -- esp_now_register_send_cb() -- which returns an ACK.
Can you opine on what that ACK can possibly tell the sending device and what it does NOT tell the sending device?
Best.

Great video and an exciting project. I was wondering if Andreas or others could provide a hand. I've recently made a weather station project consisting of an IR, light sensor, and ESP32 MCU to monitor sky conditions, especially skies impacted by light pollution, a type of Sky Quality Meter. The plan is to place this several of these SQM sensors to monitor the sky quality in our local, national park and measure the developing light pollution, which you may already know impacts flora and fauna. That way, factual data can be recorded and presented to the local authorities to take action. As you can imagine, the sensors are needed to be placed in remote areas in different places where Wifi is not available, and Lora seems to provide that solution. Any help or ideas is highly appreciated. 😊

Dear Andreas, you are a Genius !!! Thanks very much !

Good one..clear explanation

Thanks, a wonderful lesson!

Valeu!

Good video

Very interesting approach would like to find out if the data buffers would work for the the following. If you were to connect a GPS to a UART is there enough space to program it with the ability to parse the data and transmit only selected data i.e. position data? Would be nice for my hobby of flying model airplanes where sometimes things don't always work out as planned and you can spend days looking for them in the woods. Thanks

Now I have to learn how to parse all the data I'm going to generate, I'm not to hot with JSON but you and Timm have given me reason to study up a bit. Thank God for Steve Cope's tutorials. Thank you both.

hi andreas is there an email where i can contact you? its a project im working on and i need assistance, im currently in high school and its a bit difficult to understand some of the videos explaining radio frequencies and electromagnetic fields etc. i was wondering if you have an email because your videos are the easiest to understand , ty

Impressive! I wonder if it is possible to use esp-now directly on a sonoff basic.

Great video, as usual. I am a heavy user of ESP-NOW, as compared to standard WiFi+MQTT it saves a lot of battery time, 0.5s vs 5s wake-up to sleep time, in my case. The ESP-receiver and MQTT gateway are on a power supply, of course. It does not seem popular, who knows why…

I can confirm that a single ESP mcu cannot work on both ESP-NOW and WiFi networks, or at least I could not manage to do so. 😅

Thanks for another interesting video Andreas.
I used the MySensors project to do this job. It was based on the NRF24 for short range (2.4GHz) and also can do LoRa with the RF95 type boards at both 433 MHz and 868/915MHz.
One advantage of MySensors is that is is a tree network (relays) and it can do actuator commands etc.
I like ESP-Now but I reckon BLE is actually better as most smartphones are equipped for BLE these days so they can be included in the sensor network as well as a sensor and/or a controller if you feel like creating an android app for it!
Patrick

Sir can we create a similar network and send not just sensor data but low size images with espnow or some other method without wifi ? Maybe I am getting too ambitious ?

Why use ESPNow for this farmer scenario given that LoRa can do short range too? Thanks!

Hi Andreas and fans, I need help, my wife is hard of hearing mainly in the low frequencies l am having problems with my damaged vocal chords and my voice is husky. She is unable to use a hearing aid because of a nasal problem. My idea is to raise the frequency of my voice frequency and volume level, while talking or change the acoustics somehow. I am 83 and my wife is 91.

I tried to use Espnow but the signal was very poor. Only for couple meters.
Does anybody know how to fix this?

I live in a rural area and several of my neighbours passed retirement several years ago. With at least 15 minutes for fire department or ambulance to get here I've pondered some kind of "neighbour aid" system for a while, I'll be looking into this project. (Need to cover an area of about 1x2 km and 20 houses if all are interested)

Great video! 73! 🙂

Andreas, I am interested in capturing LoRa packets. Specifically, I am interested in trying to merge the existing LoraTap code in Wireshark into the radiotap code which already has mechanisms to handle pretty much all the info that can be captured from LoRa phys and chips. That will involve a capture tool that can generate the correct radiotap header etc. Do you have any recommendations on which LoRa environments I should purchase to get started on this?

Excellent. You really do a great job!

I'm building the exact same thing (for single grow room), but using just ESP between sensor modules, relay modules, and good old wifi routers for connecting to the internet. Though mine is on a small scale, so MQTT seems like it just adds indirection. I'm using a just sensor and controller modules, no repeater gateways. It's super simple and highly configurable using a regular computer web browser for the UI

Great find, and informative video, thanks for sharing

Hi @Andeas one more comment about the range of espnow Vs WiFi. I think practically it is not right to say that they both are the same. I know they operate on the same freq but then the connection process for both of them is vastly different due to which the range gets affected. To give an example, I have one ESP gateway for my espnow sensors placed on the first floor and all sensors from my roof (at G+2 level) to ground floor can easily reach it. The total time it takes for a sensor to wake up, do its thing and transmit is barely 80ms. Comparing this to a WiFi connection - even if there is weak signal present , it can never make a connection and hence considered out of range. So in my experience espnow has an excellent range as compared to WiFi.

You can use both ESPNOW and WiFi at the same time. I use it in my ESPNOW weather station. The trick is both the WiFi and ESPNOW must use the same channel, and when my AP restarts, it just picks a random channel, so when my ESPNOW to WiFi gateway reconnects to WiFi, it is no longer listening on the same channel as the weather station is transmitting on. My solution is to have the gateway broadcast an SSID (which contains the channel info), and every 1/2 the weather station looks for that SSID, and sets the channel to what the gateway is currently using. I could have just hard coded my channel in the AP, gateway and weather station, but I like to avoid hard coding configurations like that.