Don Coleman took his Arduino MKR WAN 1300 (LoRa) project to the Maker Faire and revealed exactly how well the board performs among the elements. (Image via Don Coleman GitHub)
UPDATE before it's posted: I liked the LoRa system so much, I am planning a project built around the tech you'll see soon here on element14. Now, on to the post.
I was able to see LoRa in action at Maker Faire. The following is what I gleamed from the faire.
Arduino’s new MKR WAN 1300 board with LoRa connectivity made an appearance at the 2018 Maker Faire. Maker Don Coleman did a show-and-tell on his experience with the board and the truth about what “long range” means in the topography of the Northeast United States.
LoRa, or long range, is a low-power wireless data communication technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) that uses sub-gigahertz radio frequency bands (915 MHz) for transmission of compact data packets. The technology was patented by Cycleo (now Semtech) in 2012 and has been steadily gaining popularity since, making gateways more readily available around the world.
Compared to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, LoRa is very long range. On average, Semtech advertises the signal can reach gateways up to 6.2 miles away. The world record is 436 miles, which was achieved via weather balloon between Poland and the German/Netherlands border.
This got Coleman thinking about how the technology works on the ground, so he used Arduino’s MKR 1300 to find out.
Coleman setup his own gateway using a Multitech multichannel off-the-shelf device (after a failed attempt at making his own gateway). After setting up the MKR 1300, he drove outside around his home near Philadelphia to put the device to the test.
Coleman found the device had excellent connectivity across flat land. About a mile away from his property, however, the terrain got hilly, and the signal was lost. The final result was an 0.8-mile range, which still beats Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
For more photos, slides, and code, visit Coleman’s GitHub account: http://don.github.io.
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