I’m a big fan of the ESP32 boards because of the number of communication options they managed to squeeze on the board, but I became more impressed recently when I came across the TTGO LoRa32 development boards which adds LoRa to the onboard communication features of the ESP32.
The LoRa communication capacity of the board opens up a web of possibilities and as a demonstration of how the board works, for today’s tutorial, we are going to build a LoRa Sensor Monitor with a webserver.
The idea behind the project is simple and not so different from the “Introduction to LoRa communication” project we built recently. It comprises two parts; a Transmitter and a Receiver. The transmitter comprises of a TTGO LoRa32 development board along with a BME280 sensor which is used to obtain temperature and humidity parameters from the environment. The data obtained are sent using the LoRa Communication features of the TTGO LoRa32, to the receiver which receives the data and displays it on a webpage via a webserver hosted on the board. By visiting the IP address of the server on any device on the same network as the receiver’s LoRa32 board, users will be able to see the data displayed on a webpage.
At the end of today’s project, you would know how to use both the WiFi and LoRa features of the TTGO LoRa32 board.
REQUIRED COMPONENTS
The following components are required to build this project;
- 2 x TTGO LoRa32 Development Board
- BME280
- Jumper Wires
- BreadBoard
- Power Bank or 3.7v LiPo Battery (optional)
All components can be bought via the attached links. The battery is useful if you plan to use the project without being tethered to your PC by USB Cables.
SCHEMATICS
Even though the project involves two devices (transmitter and receiver), we will create schematics for just the transmitter since the TTGO LoRa32 board has everything we need for the receiver, onboard. For the transmitter, the BME280 communicates with connected microcontrollers over I2C, as such, all we need do is connect it to the I2C pins of the TTGO LoRa32 as shown in the image below:
A pin-to-pin connection of the components is described below;
BME280 – LoRa32
GND - GND VCC - 3.3V SCL - GPIO13 SDA - GPIO21
The connections when complete should look like the image below
SETTING UP THE ARDUINO IDE
The code for today’s project will be developed using the Arduino IDE, we need to install two major support package; the ESP32 Board support package, and the ESP32 files system uploader, on it.
The ESP32 board support package provides all you need to program most ESP32-based boards with the Arduino IDE, while the ESP32 file system uploader allows access to the ESP32’s Serial Peripheral Interface Flash File System (SPIFFS). SPIFFS is a lightweight filesystem for microcontrollers that lets you access the flash memory like you would a normal filesystem on your computer. The ESP32 file uploader serves as a tool through which you can upload things like config files, or webserver files like we will be doing today, to the ESP32 SPIFFS. So instead of writing the HTML code for the webserver as a String directly on the Arduino sketch, we can write the HTML and CSS in a separate file and save them on the ESP32 filesystem.
The installation process for the ESP32 board support package has been covered in one of our past tutorials here, as such, for today’s tutorial our focus will be on the ESP32 Filesystem Uploader.
Installing the ESP32 Filesystem Uploader
To install the ESP32 filesystem uploader, it is required that you have the latest version of the Arduino IDE installed, along with the ESP32 board support for the IDE. With those in place, follow the steps below to install the file system uploader.
1. Download the File system uploader from the ESP32FS-1.0.zip release page.
2. Go to the Arduino IDE directory, and open the Tools folder.
3. Unzip the downloaded .zip folder to the Tools folder. You should have a similar folder structure: <home_dir>/Arduino-<version>/tools/ESP32FS/tool/esp32fs.jar
4. With this done, restart the Arduino IDE and Check under tools you should see the ESP32 Sketch Data Upload options there as shown below.
CODE
There are two sides to today’s project, as such, we will develop two sketches; one for the transmitter and one for the receiver. These sketches are unedited versions of the one used in Randomnerds tutorial‘s article.
Transmitter Sketch
The algorithm behind the transmitter is straight forward and similar to what we did in the “Introduction to LoRa” project. We obtain temperature and humidity data from the environment via the BME280, display it using the OLED on the TTGO LoRa32 and send it out to the receiver using LoRa communication features of the board.
To achieve this with ease, we will use five important libraries including: the Arduino LoRa library by Sandeep Mistry, the Adafruit SSD1306 library, the Adafruit_GFX library, the Adafruit_BME280 library, and the Adafruit unified sensor library. The Adafruit BME280 and Unified Sensor libraries are involved in reliably obtaining temperature and humidity information from the BME280, the Adafruit SSD1306 and GFX libraries are used in interaction with the OLED, and the Arduino LoRa library handles everything involved with sending the data to the receiver over LoRa. All five libraries can be installed via the Arduino IDE’s Library manager or by downloading them via the links attached to their names and installing them manually.
As usual, I will do a quick breakdown of the code with the aim of explaining parts that may be slightly difficult to follow. The code starts, as always, with the include statement for all the libraries that will be used.
Read more: Esp32 Lora Sensor Monitoring With Web Server (Long Range Communication)