Question about a setup with radio telemetry

[Andreas]

Dear Giuseppe!

@gtuveri

then we will work on radio firmware

We will be happy to support you regarding the radio-based firmware. The work together with you and @Thias on the node-wifi-mqtt.ino firmware was fun and lead to well documented code which is easy to follow. Let’s do the same for radio!

Currently, we have two radio-based node firmwares:

• Firmware for Open Hive RFM69 sensor node based on the RFM69 library by Felix Rusu. This one is emitting measurement data in CSV format and is currently used by @clemens.

• Generic Firmware based on the RadioHead library by Mike McCauley and the BERadio C++ library. This one is emitting measurement data in Bencode format using the BERadio specification and is currently used by @einsiedlerkrebs.

@gtuveri

and on testing a radio-wifi gateway

May i ask whether you chose the Hallard RFM69/LoRa WiFi Gateway eventually?

@gtuveri

along with a custom PCB design

In turn, we would be interested in the custom PCB design you seem to have in the making. Do you have any more information about this?

With kind regards,
Andreas.

[gtuveri]

Dear Andreas,
Yes! Hope we will be able to do at least the same :-)
It seems the BERadio can show better efficiency, then we will start performing our tests with it. However, hope we will be able to test and characterize the CSV firmware as well.
Regarding the custom PCB design, well, I forgot about the great Hallard Gateway :-), thus, we will adopt it: thanks again!

Let’s keep in touch,

Cheers,
Giuseppe

[Andreas]

Dear Giuseppe,

@einsiedlerkrebs and me just contemplated about possible embedded solutions for wireless infrastructure again. While doing that, we actually found there’s currently no firmware available for the Hallard Gateway. We will try to summarize the status quo about this question in a different topic. Just wanted to get back to you right now that currently there doesn’t seem to be a bells-and-whistles solution available, especially not for a ESP-based setup.

Cheers,
Andreas.

[Andreas]

Hi again,

we tried our best to summarize the current state about radio-based telemetry setups. We are currently using an AVR-based solution on both the sensor-node and the gateway side at one of our sites:

Embedded Radio-to-IP Gateway (AVR)

About AVR-based Radio-to-IP gateway solutions Introduction As the top dog RFM libraries like the LowPowerLab RFM69 library by Felix Rusu and the RadioHead library by Mike McCauley used to work best on the AVR, this is currently the most stable variant implementing such a gateway. All implementations showed here have these attributes in common: Send radio messages from the sensor node Receive radio messages on the gateway side Forward them to the UART interface of the AVR Receive messages from …

But of course we are also aiming at an ESP-based setup on the gateway side (both using standard RFM69, but in the future also using RFM95/LoRa):

Embedded Radio-to-IP Gateway (ESP)

About ESP-based Radio-to-IP gateway solutions The RFM library problem Currently, there seems to be no firmware based on vanilla top dog libraries like the LowPowerLab RFM69 library by Felix Rusu or the RadioHead library by Mike McCauley. Update: Both the LowPowerLab RFM69 library by Felix Rusu and the RadioHead library by Mike McCauley seem to work with the ESP8266. Read on my dear… Introduction See also: https://github.com/hallard/NodeMCU-Gateway/issues/3 https://github.com/hallard/NodeMCU-…

With kind regards,
Andreas.

[Andreas]

As you can read from the summary about AVR above, we are currently using the JeeLink USB dongle with a RFM95 radio module. The JeeLink is plugged into a RaspberryPi SoC machine.

Regarding the next steps / utilizing different hardware by tapping into an ESP-based gateway, my personal favorite would be to use the Hallard RFM69/LoRa WiFi Gateway hardware together with our Generic firmware as this already uses the RadioHead library, which in turn supports a good number of different radio modules. However, we currently can not provide any support on that combination but would like to see it flying.

In the long run, the LoPy-based solution will offer everything in an integrated package, so i’m looking forward to that as well.