Firstly I thought I'd introduce my self and give my plans for the hydro system. I've just got an allotment but dont have time to daily water so I'm going to install a solar system and a router that will take a SIM card for connection to the internet to monitor it all.
Will I be able to use a mobile WiFi box over a router or will I not gain access to the interface as it doesn't port forward as far as I'm aware; if I could do it this way it's just saving me money as I already have a EE WiFi box and data sim.
My allotment is going to have raised beds I was thinking for the ease of everything having a RPi zero w at each raised bed and use my Pi3 as the main hotspot if I connect it this way will the Pi3 drag all the data from the RPi zeros connected to it? Also if it does is there a limit on how many it will drag data from ?
I will post pictures and do a video of my updates when the system is "fully installed"
thanks
As the system now supported MQTT, it may be configured according to your schema as follow:
1) connect the Raspberry to a USB 4G dongle using the USB port, this will give the access to the system remotely from internet.
2) let the Hydrosys4 set its wifi, which will be used to connect the remote MQTT devices for each of the bed.
3) use ESP8266 wifi modules to connect sensors and relays. It should also have an analog input so there should be the possibility to connect the Resistive/capacitive soil moisture sensors.
Hi There,
Thanks for sharing your plan, it sounds very interesting with Solar power and multiple systems connected. I'm also planning to build one system powered by solar, that's the reason why I added in the latest automation hat board an analog input that can go up to 15v to monitor the batteries.
Anyway back to your project:
Systems interaction: Different systems are not designed to communicate with each other, so I'd say that using the RPI3 as hotspot is not possible at Hydrosys4 SW level. Using a router as hotspot should be better for two reasons: better wifi coverage (consider that the RPI0 has a quite poor wifi range), use of port forwarding to connect multiple systems.
Wireless Connectivity: According to the above, considering that you will have only one IP address that connects your router, the only way to differentiate the systems will be using the ports, then you require the port forwarding (normally all WiFi devices have this function). I have this setting to my home router with 3 systems and it works well. I see on ebay that there are several routers which supports data SIM and also have a decent wifi + all the routers functions (the low end are under 40 eur). Have to say that this kind of routers are not optimized to be power efficient and this is a problem for Solar powered systems, other problem is the working Voltage of these routers, normally these routers have an external power converter to lower the voltage to DC, the ideal would be to find one which works at 12v DC (which is normally the voltage of small solar systems with batteries).
Another point is that you have to know your router IP address as this is generally not static. Either you can have a DDNS or you can try the email function in the SW which provides you the IP address using the email (the latter works only with IPv4 addresses).
Hope this clarify some of your design points.
Regards,
Angelo