In the past weeks, I have extended my knowledge and demo equipment in the IoT Space using LoRaWAN Sensor, The Things Network Stack and Dragino Open Source Hardware.
Today, I am running various outdoor and indoor LoRaWAN Gateways, multiple Sensors checking on air quality, temperature and moisture levels indoors as well as Soil moist outdoors and door/window open/close sensor on my network instances, collecting data in my private data lake.
Now, I extended my network using actor sensors and some rule based actions using Node-RED as well as a manual action button from a HCL Notes App (my Data Lake app), just for the fun of it. What's the use case? I have a moisture sensor that is monitoring a veggie patch in my garden. I also set up a watering system to it and attached an electric valve to a LoRaWAN Sensor that can be triggered by a message from my Application. So if the moisture readings from the veggie patch are below a certain amount, a Node Red process that monitors the data coming into my HCL Domino Database sends an "open valve" message through "The Things Network" to my actor device which then opens the valve for water to go through for 10 Minutes. Node-Red sends the close command after 10 minutes and the device has a default of 15 Minutes, before it shuts of the valve to not cause an floodings.
Then, I decided to create a REST Endpoint to manually allow me to open/close the valve via a view action button in Notes and in an XPage deployed to my Notes Clients sidebar. And what can I say? It just works!
So why use LoRaWAN HW and a manually built app and Node Red instance to monitor that scenario? Can't i just buy a watering system from the shelf? Yes, I could - but what really interested me in my role at OpenNTF was, can I do that with OpenSource components? The answer ist yes - all the LoRaWAN Hardware is Open Source Harware, all of the Software Stack is open source as well (besides Notes and Domino of course).
Also, the open nature of the LoRaWAN Stack plus the combination of home automation components using Node-RED is a great way to combine various Hardware/Software stacks into one environment.
Interested in a demo video? Stay tuned!
Heiko.