A portable digital radio transceiver in a 3d printed case

RNODE: A Portable Unrestricted Digital Radio

March 18, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 10 Comments

RNode is an open source, unrestricted digital radio transceiver based on — but not limited to — the Reticulum cryptographic networking stack. It is another interesting project in what we might call the “Federated application” space in that it is intended to be used with no central controlling body. It can be used in a LAN or WAN context with the Reticulum network when operating in network adaptor mode, but it also has other use cases.

Essentially, RNode is a software project running on a LilyGO LoRa32 board wrapped up in a snazzy-looking 3D-printed case. Just make sure to grab a version of the board with an u.FL connector in place or somewhere to solder one. If it comes with an SMA connector, you will want to remove that. The device can be standalone, perhaps attached to a mobile device via Wi-Fi, but it needs to be hooked up to a laptop for the really interesting applications. When set to TNC mode, it can act as an APRS gateway, which allows you to access packet radio BBSs and all that fun stuff.

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Custom Library Rescues Good LoRa Hardware From Bad Firmware

March 13, 2024 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

The range of hardware that comes on some dev boards these days is truly staggering. Those little LoRa boards are a prime example — ESP32 with WiFi and Bluetooth, a transceiver that covers a big chunk of the UHF band, and niceties like OLED displays and plenty of GPIO. But the firmware and docs? Well, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Or better yet, just roll your own.

Of course that doesn’t hold true for all the LoRa dev boards on the market, but [Rop] certainly found it to be the case for the Heltec HTIT-WB32LA. This board has all the bells and whistles and would be perfect for LoraWAN and Meshtastic applications, but it needed a little help getting it over the line. [Rop]’s contribution to this end is pretty comprehensive and is based on his fork of the RadioLib library, which incorporates a library that greatly reduces wear on the ESP32’s flash memory. In addition to full radio support, the library supports all the hardware on the board from the pushbutton to the display, power management and battery charging, and of course the blinkenlights.

[Jop] includes quite a few example applications, from the bare minimum needed to get the board spun up to a full-blown spectrum analyzer. It’s a nice piece of work, and a great give-back to the LoRa community. And if you want to put one of these modules to work, you’re certainly in the right place. We’ve got everything from LoRaWAN networks to the magic of Meshtastic, so take your pick and get hacking.

Garden Light Turned Mesh Network Node

January 21, 2024 by Danie Conradie 11 Comments

We love a good deal, especially when it comes to scavenging parts for projects. Cheap outdoor solar lights are more than just garden accessories; they’re a handy source of waterproof enclosures, solar panels and batteries. This is demonstrated by [Tavis], who turned one such light into a Meshtastic LoRa communication node.

Solar Light With Meshtastic node inside — Where there’s an antenna, there’s a radio

A nice feature on this specific $15 Harbor Breeze Solar LED is the roomy solar panel enclosure with integrated 18650 battery holder, allowing for easy battery swaps. [Tavis] was able to easily fit the RAKwireless modular dev board, and wire it into the light’s charging circuit. The cheap circuit is likely not the most efficient, but will probably get the job done. It’s always possible to just swap it out with a better charging board. [Tavis] also added an external antenna by using a panel-mount SMA pigtail connector.

The Meshtastic project is all about enabling text-only communications through LoRa-based mesh networks, built using off-the-shelf devices and development boards that won’t break the bank. The project has seen some incredible growth, with people all over the world setting up their own networks.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen garden lights get used in project. We’ve seen MQTT added to a PIR solar light with some clever power saving circuitry, and as a power source for Attiny85-based projects.

Radiochat Is A Simple LoRa Interface Over WiFi

December 25, 2023 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

LoRa is often talked about as a potentially useful solution for emergency communication. The problem is, few of us are running around with LoRa hardware on a day-to-day basis. Student [William Barkoff] designed the Radiochat device as a simple tool that could pair with virtually anything over WiFi, and allow it to send and receive LoRa messages.

Radiochat is based on the Raspberry Pi Pico W, and uses the microcontroller’s wireless hardware to communicate with other devices. It provides a WiFi network that devices like laptops or smartphones can connect to. The Pico serves up a simple web page which accepts text input. Type in a message and hitting enter and the Pico will command a LoRa radio module over SPI to send that message out over the airwaves. It can then be picked up by another Radiochat module which displays the message on its own webpage.

It’s in an early state of development, and the demo video shows there are still some bugs to work out. Ultimately, though, it could be a cheap battery-powered device that lets smartphones and laptops chat over LoRa in remote areas. Indeed, [William’s] trips to New Mexico on model rocketry expeditions were a big inspiration for the project.

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The measurement results of: (a) RSSI in dBm collected from gateway 2 and (b) soil moisture during the winter period. (Credit: Maja Škiljo et al., 2022)

Using LoRa Nodes As Soil Moisture Sensing Antennas

October 2, 2023 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Implementation of LoRaWAN-based soil moisture sensing device. (Credit: Maja Škiljo et al., 2022)

Although we generally think of Internet of Things (IoT) and similar devices as things that are scattered around above ground, there are plenty of reasons to also have such devices underground. These so-called IoUT devices are extremely useful when it comes to monitoring underground structures, but communication via radiowaves is obviously impacted when soil is in the way. Although there are ways to get around this, a 2022 paper by Maja Škiljo and colleagues in Sensors covers an interesting way to make use of this signal attenuation property of changing moisture levels in soil.

By quantifying the exact attenuation of the signal received at the gateways, they were able to determine the soil moisture levels around the LoRa node which had been buried at a depth of approximately 14 centimeters. This LoRa node used off-the-shelf components consisting of an ATmega328P-based Arduino Pro Mini and SX1276-based RFM95W LoRa module with a spring antenna.

During experimentation in- and outdoors it was determined that a narrowband, printed (PCB) antenna was optimal for soil moisture sensing purposes. Other than the interesting question of how to keep soil moisture sensing nodes like this powered up over long periods of time (perhaps periodic retrieval to replenish the battery), this would seem to be a very interesting way to monitor the soil moisture levels in something like a field, where each node can provide its own ID and the received signal providing the relevant data in the form of the SNR and other parameters recorded by the gateway.

(Heading image: The measurement results of: (a) RSSI in dBm collected from gateway 2 and (b) soil moisture during the winter period. (Credit: Maja Škiljo et al., 2022) )

New LoRA Distance Record: 830 Miles!

September 15, 2023 by Jenny List 49 Comments

The LoRa radio communication system is useful for low-bandwidth communication, and as many readers will be aware its special skill lies in delivering long range. For most of us that range tops out at a few miles, but pushing the limits of what is possible for LoRa has resulted in some significant records falling. Most recently this has reached an impressive distance of 1336 kilometres, or 830 miles.

The record in question was set from near the Portuguese coast, from where LoRa beacons on a fishing boat and its buoys were able to open up a gateway on the Spanish Canary islands. The conductive surface of the sea makes an excellent aid to propagation, and from amateur radio experience we’d guess that tropospheric conditions aided by the summer weather would have something to do with it too.

Radio amateurs on those coasts and islands chase those conditions and live in hope of making a rare UHF contact across the ocean to the Americas or the Caribbean. The difference in their respective frequency allocations notwithstanding, we wonder whether the same might be possible using LoRa given a fortuitous atmosphere. We’re not quite sure whether a set of dual-band LoRa gateways could be made to test this idea though.

This record breaks a previous one set between Germany and Poland. If you think you’ve seen a far greater LoRa record here before you’d be correct, but only in the modulation scheme and not the frequency.

2023 Hackaday Prize: Two Bee Or More Bee Swarm Detection

August 21, 2023 by Matthew Carlson 6 Comments

In the bustling world of bees, swarming is the ultimate game of real estate shuffle. When a hive gets too crowded or craves a change of scenery, colonies scout out swarms for a new hive. [Captain Flatus O’Flaherty] is a beekeeper trying to capture more native honey bees, and a custom LoRa-enabled capture hive helps him do that.

A catch hive, perched high and mighty, lures scouting as potential new homes. If selected, a swarm of over a thousand bees can move in, where [Flatus]’s detector comes in. Many catch hives are scattered around, and manually checking them is difficult. While the breath of one bee is hard to see, a thousand bees produce enough CO2 to be detected by a sensor. A custom PCB with a solar-powered +30dB LoRa radio measures CO2 and reports back. The PCB contains an ESP32 D4 and a 1-watt Ebyte E22-400M30S LoRa module. If the CO2 levels are still elevated at nightfall, [Flatus] can be pretty confident a swarm has moved in.

Using the data collected, he massaged it to create a dataset suitable for training on XGBoost. With weather data and other conditions, the model tries to predict when a swarm is more or less likely to happen. Apis Mellifera (the local honeybee around [Flatus]) loves sun-kissed, warm, humid afternoons with little wind.

We’ve seen beehive monitors before and love exploring what the data could be used for—video after the break.

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