Industrial Raspberry Pi with LoRa support is a must
As the remote application market is growing rapidly, technology also needs to progress, ensuring greater range and transmission speed while reducing energy consumption. Technological progress makes it possible to create innovative standards for new, sophisticated applications that facilitate our life and work. One of wireless connection choices can be LoRa technogoly.
What exactly is LoRaWAN?
LoRa (Long Range Radio) technology with low data throughput allows IoT and M2M applications to communicate wirelessly over 15 kilometers, with a battery life of more than 10 years. LoRa allows you to connect millions of wireless nodes with compatible gateways and has several key advantages over other wireless solutions. For example, it uses spectrum spreading modulation with the ability to demodulate a signal 20 dB below the noise level.
LoRa uses license-free sub-gigahertz radio frequency bands like 433 MHz, 868 MHz (Europe) and 915 MHz (Australia and North America). LoRa enables long-range transmissions (more than 10 km in rural areas) with low power consumption.[4] The technology is presented in two parts: LoRa, the physical layer and LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network), the upper layers.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
Compared to 3G and 4G cellular networks, LoRa technology is also better scalable and more cost-effective for embedded applications. It has a much greater range than other popular wireless protocols, which allows devices to operate without amplifiers, reducing the total cost of the application.
Thanks to scalability, reliable communication, mobility and ability to work in difficult external conditions, the LoRa module is perfectly suited for use in a wide range of wireless monitoring and control applications that do not require high transmission speeds. Examples of applications may include smart city (street lighting sensors, motion sensors), energy (intelligent measurement of electricity / water / gas consumption) and industrial / commercial / home applications, among others HVAC, intelligent devices, security systems and lighting.
Use of LoRa in industrial automation
Use of wireless connection makes life and work easier for us every day – from radio stations and GSM to Wi-Fi wireless networks, Zigbee, short-range Bluetooth connectivity and LoRa. With the spread of internet access, the possibility of using wireless connectivity for a new type of service and application has opened. Terminology such as M2M (Machine to Machine) – remote communication between devices and IoT – a network of applications and devices communicating with the Internet have been created.
Device equipped with LoRa module is delivered with a LoRaWAN protocol stack, so it can be easily connected to the existing, fast-growing LoRa Alliance infrastructure – both in privately managed local area networks (LAN) and public telecommunications networks to create wide area low power WAN (LPWAN) on a national scale. LoRaWAN stack integration also allows connection to any microcontroller, such as LoRa Gateway from TECHBASE.
Introduced with Moduino series, TECHBASE developed further the project of modular aluminum case for their devices. The latest version of housing allows ModBerry to expand in any dimension, supporting additional extension cards (e.g. I/Os, modems, opto-isolation, accelerometer, etc.) and DIN rail mount, that can be retracted into device itself. TECHBASE constantly improves the project to support different platforms (e.g. Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, NanoPi, ESP32, UpBoard and probably more in the nearest future) and brings them to Industrial IoT world.