During the past two months we have kickstarted the development activities. After laying out plans for compression protocol and the new system architecture (see photo below), we implemented the basic functionality for a transmission of home automation rules over a LoRaWAN connection. As typical LoRaWAN downlink data packets are only a few bytes in size, we had to reduce the information of home automation control rules to a bare minimum. To give you an idea how aggressive the compression actually is, we managed to squeeze the original 6.53 kB JSON holding the rules into a simple set of byte strings with total size of 40 bytes. This gives an effective compression ratio of ca. 165, and so the data transmission over a LoRaWAN connection becomes manageable. The magic behind this is the dictionary based compression, which we already successfully utilized in LoRaBridge 1. 

Another fine achievement was unlocked in March as we spread the word of the original LoRaBridge project in Hackrnews. Hackrnews  is a discussion platform for all sorts of technology related topics, which gain visibility as users are able to vote the submissions by giving points. For us, not only did the post climb well into the top 10, but we also received some positive criticism, e.g. on the github page, and also tech related questions on the project. We warmly recommend the "show" concept of Hackrnews for all fellow Netidee projects. It seems like a good way to gain visibility.

Finally, we were able to integrate and test the home automation rule compression&decompression with the original LoRaBridge architecture. To our best knowledge, this was the first time implementing home automation over a LoRaWAN connection. For the record, our first PoC automation consists of a smart lightbulb, which is switched on as movement is detected from a activity detection sensor. Like in LoRaBridge 1, it was a joy seeing the idea come into reality, which is really something which pushes us forward in the project.