Hacker News Reader

Comment by l00sed | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, I need to figure out how to handle traffic better/dynamically.. Still learning. I was thinking it would be cool to leave websites "in the wild" though, like something solar powered that would stay alive and could be accessed in the area. Or something with a short lifespan that's battery powered...

View on HN

We actually did something like this at uni. Meshnet using low-power radio receivers with arduino uno and whatever else you want (gps?), a few power-stations that had solar powerbanks and 3G connection. Power stations were collecting data from the mestnet and sending it to a server. Weak nodes only required battery to be changed less often than every 3.5 month. I thought it was pretty cool.

I'm wondering how doable it would be to make such a mesh network but using LoRaWAN instead, and ensuring privacy using E2EE.

That'd be a nice project to work on.

I think the reason most WISP's are done with industry-grade receivers/transmitters (like Unifi) is the bandwidth/speed limitations of LoRa. I think, for the most part, LoRa is used mainly for remote monitoring and other low-bandwidth applications. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

We did it back in ~2011/2012, LoRa wasn't a thing back then.

Post a link if you have one! I'd love to check it out.

I sadly don't have any documentation left from this project.

Our goal was to build lowest possible energy consumption GPS tracker with "live" feedback, 2h delay was acceptable not ideal, 30min was just ideal. It was close to 30min on good weather.

I remember it used Ardunio Uno with xbee or zigbee with mesh module on radio, whichever had lower power consumption. GPS module was checking for fix every 30minutes, transmitting the location to master nodes which were sending it to our server.

Master nodes were located on hills without trees with solar-powerbanks, so even if there was no sun it would keep the nodes running for 2 months, GPS nodes were in areas without even GSM signal, and even on hills 3G was not guaranteed.

GPS nodes had replaceable rechargeable batteries, had to be changed every 3.5months. We didn't care about speed transmission.

We had budget of max. £15000 (including hardware, software and any legal fees and SIM card maintenance) for around 350 devices.

That sounds really neat. If you manage to dig any photos or documentation send it over!

It could be cool for creating some equivalent of wifi geocaching. Small simple websites that you need to get within a specific area to access.

...and somehow pay for its rx/tx costs

For small range (few km) you can just utilise LoraWAN for free communication.

This is a technology that is very interesting to me, but I have not gotten my hands on it yet. I know there were some Italians who had gotten some 100s of km using LoRa (I think it was testing for the Guifi network)

> could be accessed in the area

If you didn't want remote access you would not have to pay rx/tx costs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com