LoRa is a wireless technology with a very long range, several kilometres, and very low power draw, at the price of a very low data rate. It is the technology of distant sensors that send little data, rarely.
How does it work?
It aims at LPWAN uses, low-power wide-area networks: agriculture, the connected city, tracking objects across large areas. One distinction is worth knowing before buying anything: LoRa names the radio modulation, so two modules can talk directly, point to point, the typical case for a school project. LoRaWAN is the network protocol built on top of it (gateways and a server, The Things Network for instance) to run fleets of sensors. The trade-off is a deliberate one. Data rate is exchanged for range and for battery life, which can reach several years on a single cell, the module and the microcontroller spending most of their lives in deep sleep. There is no point looking for a continuous stream here: LoRa carries short readings, spaced far apart.
See also
- Wireless technologies — hub: where LoRa sits among the others
- Zigbee — a low-power alternative for medium range and meshing
- Deep sleep — the other half of those years of battery life
- Microcontroller — the chip that drives the LoRa module