Honey Bee Safe: LoraWan First Tries

As the bee detector is intended for use in the field, it will be best if we can use some sort of wireless connectivity to pass the information along to a central server, ideally allowing us to view results from anywhere using a browser.

The MKR WAN 1310 has Lora long-range connectivity built-in, so I'm hoping that we will be able to connect to a nearby LoraWan gateway receiver from The Things Network, which is free to use for this kind of project.

Checking the map on The Things Network website, I see I have two nodes nearby, but the Comox node, serendipitously named "comox-beeheaven", is only about 2.5km away from my house.

However, it likely has to travel through some houses and definitely through some forest, to get there. I think the clear-line-of-sight ratings are for about 10km, so if I'm lucky it might just work.

The MKR WAN board does not come with an antenna, so I added an antenna that I still happened to have from a past project, in the hopes that I will be able to get enough range. I bought it for a GPS project, but the description seems to indicate that it should also work with the frequencies used for LoraWan. Ideally I would have a bigger better and more specifically tuned antenna, but it would likely take too long to get one in for this project.

I was able to find a few examples of how to get started for using this board, so I won’t repeat those details. In a nutshell, however, you need to install support for the board in the Arduino IDE, which then provides several samples you can use to take the next steps.
To use The Things Network, you will also need to set up an account there.

After doing the first quick setup, the board told me some cool details, including the special identifier for the board, which I then used to register it with The Things Network. 

Unfortunately, it was not able to connect to a gateway from its location on my desk in my office.
However, this location would require the signal to pass through several walls and another building to get there, so my next plan is to take it to the back deck of our carriage house, which places my board and antenna about 16 feet (5 meters) off the ground with no other buildings nearby, and a more clear line to the receiver. However, there is still that forest to deal with, so I might have to settle for just using WiFi, but I sure hope the LoraWan method works!

It looks like the Nicla Vision board does also support WiFi by itself, so I may need to fall back on that option if I’m not able to make contact with the LoraWan receiver.

The other next hurdle I have to deal with is that I don’t have a laptop anymore! So getting serial console information from the MKR WAN board while on the back deck of the carriage house will require some kind of clever workaround… Maybe I can use a little Android phone I have, or else I can probably set up a Raspberry Pi up in the carriage house suite with a loooooong USB cable to the MKR board.

That’s it for now! I will let you know how things go :)