After deploying the TTN Gateway in my loft last year, I’ve finally got round to deploying a sensor to make use of it.
As the great lock down of 2020 kicked off I stuck in a quick order with Pimoroni for a Adafruit Feather 32u4 with an onboard LoRa radio (In hindsight I probably should have got the M0 based board).
I already had a DHT22 temperature & humidity and the required resistor so it was just a case of soldering on an antenna of the right length and adding the headers so I could hook up the 3 wires needed to talk to the DHT22.
There is an example app included in with the TinyLoRa library that reads from the sensor and sends a message to TTN every 30 seconds.
(There are full instructions on how to set everything up on the Adafruit site here)
Now the messages are being published to TTN Application I needed a way to consume them. TTN have a set of Node-RED nodes which make this pretty simple. Though installing them did lead to a weekend adventure of having to upgrade my entire home automation system. The nodes wouldn’t build/install on Node-RED v0.16.0, NodeJS v6 and Raspbian Jessie so it was time to upgrade to Node-RED v1.0.4, NodeJS v12 and Raspbian Buster.
This flow receives messages via MQTT direct from TTN, it then separates out the Temperature and Humidity values, runs them through smooth nodes to generate a rolling average of the last 20 values. This is needed because the DHT22 sensor is pretty noisy.
It outputs these smoothed values to 2 charts on a Node-RED Dashboard. which show the trend over the last 12 hours.
It also outputs to 2 MQTT topics that mapped to my public facing broker, which means they can be used to resurrect the temperature chart on my home page, and when I get an outdoor version of the sensor (hopefully solar/battery powered) up and running it will have both lines that my old weather station used to produce.
The last thing the flow does is to update the temperature reading for my virtual thermostat in the Google Assistant HomeGraph. This uses the RBE node to make sure that it only sends updates when the value actually changes.
The next step is to build a couple more and find a suitable battery and enclosure so I can stick one in the back garden.
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