Makerfabs LoRa gateway support

Boards
1

Hi all, I just ordered a LoRa gateway from Makerfabs (along with a bunch of their soil moisture sensor), link: MaESP ESP32 Lora Gateway | Makerfabs
It can either be a Wroom or Wrover ESP32 (I picked a Wrover).

I don’t see it in the list of supported boards though. Has anyone ever looked into this one? Would it be hard for a neophyte to add support for it? I delved a bit into esphome already and am not afraid to get my hands dirty.

I have a pretty extensive smart home anyway, but these are my first LoRa devices and it would seem OMG it’s the best way to get them into home assistant.

2

Hello,

You need to take a look at their documentation, identify the different components and how they are linked with the ESP32.
If the components have already a module in OMG, it will be mainly about pin mapping and configuration = defining an environment into the environment.ini file, and testing that it works well.
If it is not the case this is more complex as it will require development

3

Thanks! They are using standard SX127x LoRa modules that are supported by the arduino-lora library, so it shouldn’t be too hard indeed. Gonna take a look as soon as I receive the gateway, PR incoming.

1 Like
4

Default are ttgo pins.

You may need change pins

5

I’ve got the gateway working locally, I need to make it pretty so ttgo and makerfabs can coexist before I make a PR.

I’m now trying to connect my moisture sensors, I do seem to pick up their messages, but they are hex encoded and it’s unclear how I should decode them. Do I do that on the OMG side, or the Home Assistant side?

I tried decoding them manually using a js library, but it only partially decoded stuff, I still couldn’t see the data.

The moisture sensors are standard AHT10 sensors, I do see some code related to them in OMG but it’s not clear how I should use it.

6

Hi @alucryd

Have you added
${libraries.ahtx0}
to your lib_deps, and
'-DZsensorAHTx0="AHTx0"'
to your build_flags in your custom environment?

Then hook the AHT10 sensors up following the pinout table at

and you should get the decoded messages as described at

Hope this helps

7

He says before realising that the AHTx0 isn’t included in the table :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Best to follow the pinout in config_AHTx0.h

8

Hi @DigiH, I was under the impression that this was for when you directly connect the sensor to the ESP, but in my case the sensor is broadcasting messages via LoRa. They are prebuilts from Makerfabs: Lora Temperature/ Humidity/ Soil Moisture Sensor V3 | Makerfabs
I need to decode hex messages like this one:

9151DDFE267EDD6EBF550137195529A4655E5DCCEBE16D2FC9BA5E5FA4A9F6CBCD1F5BBA7B37B3B9ADF55D4550B9822E0651043D1EB25851BA33D76D19D67BB3A27470AC7BFA92FEFC57DC2D46F1E0FCBC8EFD2DBF5EE28D70CAD79A32EA12848D508AE64D94C1B05267377C
9

Correct, sorry, then I misread you, assuming you had them connected directly to an ESP running OMG.

These being open source hardware and software devices, I assume you have the details about the properties’ hex encoding. Any link to the firmware?

Alternatively you could try your own reverse engineering if you have another option to get the actual values off the devices/

If you implement this in OpenMQTTGateway or Home Assistant is really up to you preference. Implementing it in OMG would also allow you to create a discovery for them, so HA integration would be simpler if you have several of them.

10

Ok, seems to be

Then I’m not sure why you’re not getting the hex messages and not the stated described message, which doesn’t seem to be hex encoded either from your example :frowning:

11

Been making progress, the hex data must be coming from devices I don’t own. Turns out OMG discards the data coming from the sensors as it’s not JSON :confused: Not sure adapting OMG to parse the terrible format that comes out of these sensors is the way to go. Ordered a USB 2 UART adapter so I can rewrite the firmware of these sensors to output JSON data instead.

12

It’s LoraWAN? You may need change firmware