Planning

The LoRaBridge technology shall primarily enable flexible range extension for battery driven sensors. However, as the number of available low power sensors is simply put huge, some prioritization was necessary to craft a list of sensor devices, which cover the most popular sensor use-cases. These include e.g. temperature, humidity, air-pressure and motion detection sensors based on Zigbee 3.0 technology.

Studying

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” -S.Jobs. With this statement in mind, we set out to evaluate the available hardware and software components to ensure we have the best ingredients for the LoRaBridge range extender. To this end, for us it was important to look for well designed open-source frameworks with long-term support and active user-base/community. Furthermore, we devoted time to study state-of-the-art data compression algorithms which might turn out indispensable given a use-case with larger number of local sensors.

Testing

Getting to play with new hardware is for a maker nearly the same as what the Christmas eve is to a toddler. We had plenty of fun arranging LoRa/Zigbee modules with Raspberry PIs and firing up the necessary software for the first time. Despite having experience in bringing ideas into life from previous projects, it was very exciting for us to see that the design will actually work.