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Here's a quick question I hope somebody can shed some light on. I live in a small-ish town in Yorkshire, probably a couple of miles square and was wondering ab
by escapologybb 9y ago
Here's a quick question I hope somebody can shed some light on. I live in a small-ish town in Yorkshire, probably a couple of miles square and was wondering about the feasibility of using these little devices to create a mesh network to extend my home network.
The reason being is that I have lots of Internet connected devices which watch over me whilst I'm in the house, being Quadriplegic it's much more comforting to have a computer watch over my health and do things for me than it is to have a potentially tired, angry and/or bored person doing it. However, that bubble ends as soon as I pass out of Wi-Fi range.
So obviously I would like to extend coverage to cover my smalltown, but everything I've seen so far has been prohibitively expensive. It wouldn't need to have a massive amount of bandwidth available as it would be just me using it, but it would need to be fairly cheap and as near to 100% reliable as possible.
Any insights, questions, comments? TIA
Edited To Add: I've just measured it using Google Earth and I need to cover a circle with an area of about one square kilometre.
- mschuster91 9y agoUhhhh. I'd take a look at LoRaWAN or SigFox technology, but that needs appropriate support in your IoT stuff. The alternative would be a small battery-powered 4G hotspot like the Huawei E5573CS-322.
- escapologybb 9y agoI had never heard of either of those two technologies but I would definitely do some googling now, thanks for the tip. I would rather avoid a 4G hotspot attached to my wheelchair for a couple of reasons, chief among them is the data costs would be really high. If I were to extend my home Wi-Fi network I've already paid for my Internet connection, I'm just making my home Wi-Fi network WAY BIGGER than it was intended to be. :-)
- mcroydon 9y agoThe Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 (http://www.heltec.cn/project/wifi-lora-32/ http://www.heltec.cn/project/wifi-lora-32/) and clones are a solid place to start if you want to investigate LoRa. Pycom (https://pycom.io https://pycom.io) has several chips including one that does both LoRa and Sigfox. Espressif also have a shorter distance but lower power option that uses WiFi tech called ESP-Now that is worth looking at: http://espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-now/overview http://espressif.com/en/products/software/esp-now/overview
- bicubic 9y agoYour links sent me down a rabbit hole of Iot stuff and now I'm super excited about it. Had no idea that lte-m is so widespread. It's only a matter of time before it's easier and cheaper to get any kind of networked devices onto a carrier network than the users wifi. The implications are kinda scary though: does this mean it's only a matter of time before the majority of personal devices talk to their users with a telco/govement middle man network?
- sputr 9y agoMaby contact these guys: https://wlan-si.net/en/ https://wlan-si.net/en/ They are(were) deploying wifi mesh networks on the cheap in Slovenia. They've covered entire towns that did not have internet access in the past (mesh network in the town + string of directed antenna to get an uplink from a bigger town). Routers they used cost in the range of 15€ each, but the last time I talked to them they had trouble supplying new routers.
- escapologybb 9y agoThanks for the link, I will definitely get in touch with them. Paying for the equipment isn't the issue I don't think, it's the expertise and looking for.
- jacquesm 9y agoIs a cell phone based system an option? Reliability is going to be the hard part.
- escapologybb 9y agoIt's not totally out of the question but from what I can see it would be prohibitively expensive after a while, whereas an upfront cost for some low-cost networking hardware that would then get its Internet connection from my home router would be much cheaper in the long run. I think.
- driverdan 9y agoIf you're not using a lot of data a mobile phone is a great way to do it. Low end Android phones are cheap and surprisingly powerful. Prepaid phone plans are inexpensive.
- clort 9y agoI bought a huawei 4g mobile wifi device off ebay for about 25 quid earlier this year, and have a 3 sim card (the huawei device is branded 3 anyway, but they don't lock them) with 20Gb/mo data for 15/mo but you can get cheaper contracts since you don't need that much data. I run it from 12v, pretty sure you could mount it on an electric weelchair..
- j_s 9y agoLoRaWAN packet received at record distance of 702 km | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15201692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15201692 Specifically mention of two Ubiquiti M900 (~$130 each) for line-of-sight internet from home. Related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15246659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480551