Nik writes to educate and delight people considering IoT, and to inspire other IoT nerds to build and deploy their own projects into the world. He runs a podcast discussing all things LoRaWAN and is psyched to hear about what you're building, whether it's a one sensor playground or a million sensor rollout.
View all authorsLoRaWAN sensors on Helium can be used for an awful lot of things, and in this blog we use AI (plus Nik at MetSci) to write about exploring some of the possible use cases.
If this is your first time at the MetSci (short for MeteoScientific) site and you just want to try using things and muddling through, head over to the Console, sign up for an account and get going.
A friend of mine reached out the other day asking what to use to track a [redacted] at pretty decent volume, with a freight value of $200,000/day. It opened up the conversation about IoT connectivity, and what to use when.
If you're a business owner and psyched on LoRaWAN (or even just curious about it), one of the things you'll have to wrap your head around is how to store your data.
LoRaWAN devices are generally exceptional at sending data from one place to another, but if you want your data to be useful you have to both retain it and be able to integrate it into what you want.
What if I told you that a single IoT sensor could turn your entire neighborhood into a playground that got people interested in IoT?
There's this story in IoT that you need thousands of sensors to make a difference. Maybe that's true.
The number one threat to LoRaWAN isn’t technical issues or competition, according to Alper Yegin, CEO of the LoRa Alliance.
It’s awareness. Not enough people know about LPWANs, let alone LoRaWAN. What does that mean for you, the business owner who is deploying LoRaWAN to service clients?
One of the very first questions any reasonable business owner will have when they’re deciding whether or not to use LoRaWAN to connect their sensors to the internet is, “How do I get coverage?”
Implementing IoT (Internet of Things) solutions for monitoring and controlling utilities can yield substantial cost savings in water, electricity, sewer, gas, and HVAC usage.
This analysis provides data-backed justification for IoT adoption across five major U.S. cities –
Can you use LoRaWAN for emergencies? Yep. Semtech and iWOW Technology Ltd announced they've been running a LoRaWAN based emergency alert system in Singapore covering 10,000 public housing flats; that's a lot!
LoRaWAN's technological roots date back to 2009 in Grenoble, France, when Nicolas Sornin and Olivier Seller began experimenting with chirp spread spectrum (CSS) modulation for low-power, long-range communications.
Synethesia is when the expereince of one sense triggers another. The classic example is seeing colors when hearing music, but you could taste words, smell sounds, or feel textures when you see colors.
A recent excellent Freakonomics episode with David Eagleman sparked an idea on how to combine synthestia with LoRaWAN for spatial awareness in the military context.
Back in 2022, Mike Harttree, an IoT Architect at Cisco, gave a talk at the LoRa Alliance's annual conference about how the U.S. government is using LoRaWAN to enhance operational efficiency and tackle long-standing logistical challenges.
With all the current fuss about Meshtastic and LoRa, I thought it'd be a good idea to review what has already been done. Some of this is super basic (replacing fuel stick measurements with digital ones), but after all, that's what IoT is about; digitizing the measurements of our world.
It doesn't have to be fancy, it just has to work.