Design of a portable LoRa capable sensor node

• Main Author: Law, Robin Zheng Hao
• Other Authors: Mo Li
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148005
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are a network of physical devices that are embedded with software, sensors, and network connectivity to collect and share data. Specifically, sensors present in such a network play an important role as they collect large amounts of data on areas such as medical care, industrial, logistics and transportation. In turn, the data collected is analysed to detect large trends in the data to better improve the environment the sensor is monitoring. Such devices are often installed at hard-to-reach places and it becomes even more so since the proliferation of low power wide area networks (LPWAN) due to its low power consumption and large communication range. Much of the devices uses Arduino due to its open-source platform and ease of use. However, the current Arduino-based devices are lacking in program space needed to fit in the radio libraries needed for wireless communication. Additionally, current application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for such libraries do not provide enough customisability. Therefore, in this study, a new sensor node is designed and developed, Subsequently, it will be tested for its performance in an indoor or outdoor environment. This sensor node consists of several components those are packed into a single small footprint, namely: a LoRa transceiver module, the STM32F103CBT6 microcontroller, pluggable sensors, and a boost converter circuit. Keywords — LoRa; Boost Converter; Portable sensor node