Low-Power IoT Devices for Measuring Environmental Values

This paper presents how Pycom, Waspmote and Raspberry Pi devices meet low power requirements as part of Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies improve scalability, efficiency and optimize the structure responding to known IoT drawbacks such as low energy, resources and slow information processing. They are part of applications included in Smart City, Smart Home, Smart Grid, mainly telemetry. Libelium technology, including the Waspmote devices, are presented in this paper. Pycom has a variate set of devices: Pysense having five integrated sensors: temperature, humidity, altitude, pressure and light, LoPy, LoPy4 microcontrollers, Pytrack, SiPy, FiPy, GPy, WiPy, expansion boards. Raspberry Pi is known for being a single board-computer which is running its own operating system (OS). It consumes more power, unless running processes are prioritized for lowering the consumption, which requires a vast Linux knowledge. In this article we present an experiment using Pycom and Pysense which will show its capability for collecting data from the environment. Also, this paper describes how the montage works with Adafruit cloud. Pycom devices functioning in low-power wide-area networks use long range (LoRa) antennas which are especially designed for such networks. This type of antenna helps Pycom montages to save energy and for this to take effect, it must be placed in a LPWAN network. LoRa runs well in exposed environments, but connection can be affected by buildings. Having 14dBm output power, LoRa covers 25 km flat areas.