In the 6th semester of my studies @ FHNW I worked together with Josua Stierli on our Bachelor Thesis.

Abstract

The company AdNovum Informatik AG develops software, in this business they are a big global player. The swiss mobile-payment system Twint was developed by them. Now they want to step into the field of IoT devices, therefore they launched the project IoT Washer and IoT Letterbox. These devices should be observed. The user should be notified by a smartphone app about the current state of the device.

The goal of this project is to gain knowledge in the field of low-power battery IoT devices and therefore build a LoRaWAN IoT device. LoRaWAN is a long-range low-power technology developed by Semtech and standardized by the LoRa Alliance.

First a LoRa Gateway was built and the capability of the network was tested. As service provider the open-source The Things Network is used. Acceleration measurements were taken on different washers to understand the vibrations, which were emitted while the machine is running.
Later a LoRa-Node was designed as a printed circuit board and programmed in c code with the LoRaWAN library LMIC.
The node utilizes a NXP LPC54102 dualcore ARM Cortex M0+ / M4 microcontroller and a RFM95 LoRa transceiver.

The LoRa-Node successfully recognizes whenever the washer starts running. Also the end of a wash cycle is detected every time. If the LoRa radio reception is adequate every message reaches the gateway and the user is notified by a push message.