On February 6th 2017 swiss television news SRF Tagesschau reported about our project Carbosense and presented our newest LoRaWAN sensor for CO2.
Carbosense is a project initiated by Empa, Swisscom, Decentlab and SDSC. It proposes a worldwide unique, dense CO2 low power sensor network combined with atmospheric transport models.
IVU Softwareentwicklung GmbH, our LoRaWAN network partner in Germany, will present our devices and web services at E-World Essen from 6th to 9th February. Visit them at their booth.
The focus of E-world energy & water is innovative solutions for the energy supply of the future - from generation, through distribution and storage to retail, efficiency and green technologies.In the area of storage, decentralised facilities and energy services, the trade fair is growing constantly.Numerous exhibitors present themselves at Germany’s largest Smart Energy trade fair with its focus on renewable energy and intelligent technologies.
We are sponsoring Make Zurich 2017
Make Zurich is the civic tech and LoRaWAN hackathon for a better city. It will take place from February 3-4.
It will bring together the local hacker/maker community and the city administration to explore new ways of solving the problems of cities with the help of open networks and civic tech.
There will be six real needs of different departments of the City of Zurich that could be solved with LoRaWAN and civic tech.
Since mid May Eawag, Department Urban Water Management, is testing our ultra sonic level sensor nodes to monitor waste water reservoirs within their field site Urban Water Observatory. A spatially distributed monitoring of the urban water cycle will be implemented during the next five years.
The nodes communicate using novel LoRaWAN technology. LoRa communication is an excellent candidate to realize such distributed monitoring applications. With its long range capabilities and low power characteristics it is ideal for the current monitoring setup.
Sensor data from our nodes are sent from below ground, inside sewer manholes and retention tanks to a LoRa gateway located on a roof of a public building. Gateway and network server infrastructure is operated by Loriot.io.
Visualization of sensor data, data export and data access run on our cloud infrastructure. We are looking forward to see first results from the field tests in the near future.
Yesterday a new LoRaWAN gateway was brought online by Swisscom LPN near Aarau (Wasserflue). Our node located in Fehraltorf recording precipitation successfully transmits its data over this gateway located more than 56km away!
The node is part of the research project Urban Water Observatory from Eawag, Department Urban Water Management in which the urban water cycle is monitored with spatially distributed sensors to answer pressing questions regarding future developments of water infrastructure.
The node further sends data over LoRaWAN gateway located on top of Bachtel since last Friday. Already before data has been received from the gateways on Zürichberg and Uetliberg.
It is great to see how Swisscom LPN network grows and data reliability and coverage increases.
See our realtime demo for Swisscom and other LoRaWAN network provider.
End of July Thomas Amberg (@tamberg) and Decentlab did some LoRa (The Things Network) range tests in the region of Murten for TTN-Bern. See coverage map below including some measurements recorded crossing the lake by Thomas.
Coverage map created with coverage-mapper and LoRaWAN Demonstrator
Since end of July we monitor soil moisture and temperature in region of Lake Murten with our GS3 sensor.
We started a soil monitoring demo for evaluating TheThingsNetwork (LoRa infrastructure) and our rugged GS3 soil moisture & temperature node.
We deployed 3 nodes in different locations in Zurich. Sensor data is transmitted over LoRa to the gateways which are up to 7.5km away from the sensor location.
Thanks to the TheThingsNetwork Zurich for the infrastructure.
This strongly improves data transfer times and optimizes the usage of the limited bandwidth in the 868MHz ISM band in which the LoRaWAN gateways operate.
Our nodes periodically adapt spreading factor by instructions sent from the LoRaWAN network server. With this we help the operators to run as much as possible nodes in parallel and let them coordinate the nodes for optimal data rate and range. The nodes significantly benefit by the lower power consumption in higher data rate modes.
With SF7 transmit time is 20 times shorter than with SF12!
Live demo using Swisscom LPN network:
We moved our The Things Network gateway (FFFEB827EB686374) for TTN-CH from top floor office (inhouse) to the rooftop of our building. By this change coverage in Glatttal is significantly increased. See below picture of our gateway antenna and a map showing some coverage data. Change of RSSI between indoor and outdoor with new antenna ~16dB.
With this change Wallisellen, Schwamendingen, Opfikon, Brütisellen, Wangen, Dietlikon and Dübendorf have basic coverage with The Things Network.
Interactive map on gist.github.com
Over the last 24 hours Zurich area had permanent rain fall. We recorded this event with a level sensor over river Chriesbach in Dübendorf. We installed our ultrasonic level sensor using LoRaWAN communication several months ago at this location.
Since mid of March Decentlab's LoRa nodes send data over LPN network from Swisscom. Current tests show very reliable data delivery from our nodes via Swisscom to our applications server.
Our test nodes located in Dübendorf transmit data to the gateway located on Zürichberg and from time to time even to the gateway located on top of Üetliberg (Distance: 11km, not direct line of sight)!
Realtime demos on lora.decentlab.com over Swisscom LPN
lorawan-range-detector (Water level monitoring over LoRaWAN network)
LoRa 1 channel node supports nearly all sensors found on our products list.
Radial stem growth of trees is limited to a relatively short time period of the year in spring and summer. The timing of the growth period depends on site and species and is mainly explained by the local temperature conditions. Norway spruce trees at the subalpine site Davos start their radial stem growth about one and a half months later than the pine trees in the Valais. The length of the growth period, however, is similar.
© TreeNet 2016, authored by Roman Zweifel
Find out more
TreeNet - The biological drought and growth indicator network
TreeNet is equipped with wireless nodes from Decentlab on more than 20 sites to record the stem radius changes every 10 minutes on more than 300 trees, soil water potentials and micro climate parameters.
When do trees grow (1)?
When do trees grow (2)?
When do trees grow (3)?
In the last few days we collected range data of The Things Network Zurich for a coverage map. For the measurements we used Adeunis GPS. This map will be updated in real time as we sample new data.
We had the pleasure to attend the "Luftschadstoffe und ihre Modellierung" event at Empa on the 20th January.
During the day, Christoph Hüglin from Empa, presented "Statistische Modellierung und der Nutzen von dichten Sensor-Messnetzen in Städten", which included our joint work on developing an low-cost air quality station.
