Any chance for LORA protocol integration?

[Jairo Vrolijk]

Hi all,
I was wondering if LORA protocol could be integrated at a later stage?
I have to say, the MySQM+ project by Mr. Brown (et al.) is not only a fun project but also an educational one. I ordered a few printed PCBs and all components and made the project from scratch. Learned a lot in the process.

To raise awareness of the impact of light pollution, I plan to place 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 Wi-Fi is not available. A Lora seems to provide a solution since the Gateway will probably be placed about ~10km away. Any help or ideas is highly appreciated.

Br,
Jairo (Aruba)

[brownrb]

Hi Jairo
We are nearing the end of things, the next update (129-05) is due for release shortly and the final stages for that is nearing completion.

I understand that some work may have already been done re LORA, not by me though, and I do not have access to that.

We have a few things to consider, the foremost is that this (mySQM+) is really a killer app for the ESP32, and if all options are enabled, we quickly run out of available space, so something would have to be given up to make room for any new addition - which is why the esp32 daughter boards are important, they allow addition of other things without placing additional burdens on the mysqm+ controller.

The other problem besides space is the conflict with existing pins. The pins on the ESP32 which are needed to drive something like the RFM95 LORA board could be used with the sandeep library, except for D18 which is used for the rain tipping bucket.

I would probably be tempted to use a esp32 daughter board with LORA (recieve) to get details from a remote device/sensor (esp32 LORA sender), then use espnow fron the esp32 daughter board to a mysqm+ controller, rather than put the LORA reciever on the mySQM+ controller. The code overhead for the mySQM+ then is minimal.

Regards
Robert