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How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

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Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#21

Post by bravo22 »

blhack wrote: post #13

This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…

Compromise is you'll get a few bits to 1kbps at best over a few Km of range. It would work for some applications but not for all of them.

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#23

Post by blhack »

dconrad wrote: post #19
blhack wrote: post #13

This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…

Glad you agree. :) We're putting up a LoRa network here in SF, and plan to publish a bunch of our test data, including link error rates and throughput. Urban deployments are new so more data will help us all understand what's doable. (There are a few rural deployments in production; less uncertainty there.)

What tech are you using for the base station?

I'd love to put one in our hackerspace out here :) -- a few offices of people working on IoT would probably think that was pretty cool.

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#24

Post by blhack »

bravo22 wrote: post #21
blhack wrote: post #13

This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…

Compromise is you'll get a few bits to 1kbps at best over a few Km of range. It would work for some applications but not for all of them.

This is all that IoT needs, though. It's not about streaming video or music or something, it's about a sensor that goes high when somebody is sitting in a chair, or that sends an integer value once every few minutes.

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#25

Post by vegabook »

dconrad wrote: post #19
blhack wrote: post #13

This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…

Glad you agree. :) We're putting up a LoRa network here in SF, and plan to publish a bunch of our test data, including link error rates and throughput. Urban deployments are new so more data will help us all understand what's doable. (There are a few rural deployments in production; less uncertainty there.)

Anything similar going on in Europe? London specifically? I would love to create some pocketable hardware that never needs recharging and sends text and (compact) vector-based graphical market updates to people.

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#26

Post by vegabook »

blhack wrote: post #24
bravo22 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compromise is you'll get a few bits to 1kbps at best over a few Km of range. It would work for some applications but not for all of them.

This is all that IoT needs, though. It's not about streaming video or music or something, it's about a sensor that goes high when somebody is sitting in a chair, or that sends an integer value once every few minutes.

Is bandwidth realistically at least in the high hundreds/low thousands of bps? Or are we literally talking a couple of bytes per minute?

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#27

Post by ju-st »

jws wrote: post #3

I'm intrigued. Anyone want to suggest an economical development board or transceiver?

Here is a nice writeup about the whole topic and some board recommendations. http://www.instructables.com/id/Introducing-LoRa-/

SX1278 is the string you want to search for on Aliexpress/Alibaba

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#28

Post by ju-st »

bravo22 wrote: post #21
blhack wrote: post #13

This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…

Compromise is you'll get a few bits to 1kbps at best over a few Km of range. It would work for some applications but not for all of them.

Is that 1kbps shared between all devices in range?

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#29

Post by makomk »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #4

Would this open possibilities for a direct machine to machine network that didn't go over the internet? (I.e. could I set up something to ssh to my home server from my laptop without needing wifi/cellular coverage?

Probably not. Not only are they very slow, but radio propagation at the frequencies they're using is still more or less line-of-sight, which means that your range is going to be limited by the horizon. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-of-sight_propagation

Re: How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things

#30

Post by bdamm »

dconrad wrote: post #19
blhack wrote: post #13

This is un. fucking. real. I work in the IoT space (specifically on health devices), and something like this would be absolutely a GOD SEND for the things that we're doing. The current "hottness" in our space is bluetooth low energy (BLE). This is super low power (or, rather: chips that are really good at going to deep sleep, and then coming online very quickly to burst some data out), but the range on BLE isn't grea…

Glad you agree. :) We're putting up a LoRa network here in SF, and plan to publish a bunch of our test data, including link error rates and throughput. Urban deployments are new so more data will help us all understand what's doable. (There are a few rural deployments in production; less uncertainty there.)

How will you deal with device contention as the density of devices increases?
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