LoRa Communication Mesh Development

Designed and delivered a complete long-range wireless sensor network for large-scale agricultural monitoring across remote farm lands spanning up to 20km — where no wired or cellular infrastructure exists.

Each field node, built on an ESP32-S3, measures soil moisture and temperature at three depths (0m, 50m, 100m) and relays data across a LoRa mesh network with ~3km per hop range. Nodes are chained to bridge the full 20km coverage area, with each hop forwarding aggregated data toward the central gateway. To maximise field life, nodes run deep sleep duty cycles between measurements, paired with a solar charging circuit and BMS — making each unit fully self-sustaining with zero maintenance power requirements.

PCB design demanded serious RF discipline: controlled impedance traces and careful RF layout around the LoRa antenna feed ensure link budget is not wasted to PCB parasitics — critical when every decibel matters across kilometre-scale links. Hardware is rated to survive -40°C Romanian winters, housed in a custom 3D-printed weatherproof enclosure for outdoor field deployment.

A Raspberry Pi running a Linux daemon serves as the central gateway, handling simultaneous uplink reception from multiple nodes, data aggregation, and upstream forwarding. The full stack — node firmware and gateway software — is written in C++ and Python respectively.