Moteino (arduino-based wireless dev platform) supports LoRa if anyone is interested in digging into some current sub-$10 ISM transceivers and their capabilities. http://lowpowerlab.com/moteino/#lora it's also a great project to get started with arduino if you've never worked with it before. Really solid documentation.
Oh I missed that, thanks. My local Hackerspace made some boards that have that LoRa radio and an ESP8266 on them, I might grab some of those as I'm not in the US and Adafruit won't ship here cheaply, thank you.
The GPIO pints give a reasonable point of interface for a LoRa module. Or you could interface it with one of the Lilygo offerings and have a programmable LoRa/Meshtastic/disaster.radio compatible device.
For LoRa, check out Multitech, LinkLabs, and Libelium. Semtech has a development board, too, though it would need to be paired with a microcontroller. Warning that most of this stuff is not for the faint of heart -- you need to be ready to dive into datasheets, bring up radio drivers, etc.
Ingenu has radio modules and dev boards, but I don't think they're set up to sell single-unit quantity.
If you're in San Francisco, we're making a going to be distributing dev boards that will work out of the box and come with a bunch of sensors. Just sign up on our website: www.beepnetworks.com
Like the author mentioned, these are new-ish/emerging standards and there isn't a de-facto board like Arduino just yet. Therefore it's kind of hard to recommend a board that I know has a ton of documentation and a big community.
However, if you are the adventurous type and don't mind working with unpolished libraries and figuring things out from function descriptions, there are tons of smaller people putting out boards on Tindie: https://www.tindie.com/
But bottom line is that this tech isn't (yet) popular enough to try without getting a little dirty. If you can afford a bigger battery, try 900 MHz Xbee transmitters for an easy to interface serial with long range.
I think if this interests you, you'll like the LoRa-based devices better. They're unlicensed, so you can encrypt, use it without a ham radio license, etc. LoRa is pretty proprietary which is evil and all, but the end result is good.
The LORA stuff is pretty cool in that the radio stack (if you can call it so, it's super little code) is open source and you can get complete modules with an STM32 and the associated LoRa radio circuitry and just add power and an antenna.
These radios have been available for quite some time, it's the Semtech SX127x line (e.g. SX1276). I was looking into LoRa and other long-range IoT WAN radios about a year ago for a research project.
You can get cheap (22 USD) Arduino-compatible development boards here using HopeRF modules, which work great with the RadioHead library:
Great to see that you're still exploring hardware, Eric! I'm definitely planning to get one of these, but as some others have mentioned, I might attempt to convert it into a LoRa peer-to-peer communicator. Currently, I rely on MestTastic relays, which can be quite cumbersome due to the need for an iPhone or Android device.
That's awesome, this kind of thing was the first idea I had when I saw the LoRa radios, but was far too lazy to start doing :p still have the hardware at home; ill see if I can install it later.
lora is used for more than just consumer iot control - it's one of the most effective ways to bridge a serial connection across a very low bandwidth/RF difficult or weak link.
Massimo this is great. LoRa client support and maybe also an Arduino LoRa Gateway it will be amazing for rolling out nodes in agriculture. These areas are often not served by existing networks so a DIY-solution will always have its spot.
Does anybody happen to know of off the shelf LoRa radios that I could use to link two Linux machines with a minimum of tinkering? Preferably with connectors for external antennas. Preferably usable as LoRaWAN gateways down the line, or perhaps even simultaneously.
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