lorawan/chirpstack/indigo - long distance communication...

For some time i've been wanting to locate some sensors and a relay over 500m from nearest wifi/mains power.

I've achieved the first phase of this with great success using LoraWAN, which is capable of 10km outdoor range with relatively inexpensive hardware and no network costs. Currently I have sensor monitoring, working. next phase is implementing the relays (controlling a solar pump).

Given the increasing availability and affordability of LoraWAN network and devices in their various forms, it would make a lot of sense to have simple Indigo integration supporting one or more of the major LoraWAN network servers (I am using a local instance of the open source Chirpstack server, but others would include clould platforms ie TheThingsNetwork and Helium). I've rigged up communication between Indigo and Chirpstack leveraging MQTT and node-red ( in the process learning far more about javascript than I ever intended...)

I can't find any threads on this topic so thought it might be worth checking no-one else is going down this track?

My gateway setup is an 8-channel RAK2445 RPi hat on a RPi3, running the full Chirpstack stack as private LoraWAN network (there is no public coverage of TTN etc at this remote location). I am testing a number of remote nodes, including Dragino, the very impressive LoPy4. MQTT is quite integral to LoraWAN so the integration is actually quite straight forward once everything is correctly configured!