The Challenge After 10 weeks, I had a problem. A good problem, but a problem nonetheless: Week 9: Two Modbus TCP nodes (STM32F446 + W5500 Ethernet) Week 10: Two LoRaWAN nodes (STM32WL55 native radio) Separate dashboards: Modbus data in one Grafana, LoRaWAN in another Different buckets: modbus bucket, lorawan bucket No unified view: Can’t compare all 4 nodes at once Week 11’s goal: Unify everything into a single monitoring platform while analyzing what it would take to make this production-ready from a security perspective. ...
The Challenge For the first 9 weeks of this project, I’ve been using RYLR998 LoRa modules - simple AT command modules that handled the radio work while my STM32 focused on sensors. They worked beautifully for point-to-point communication (600m range, 95% success rate), but they had a fundamental limitation: They weren’t LoRaWAN. LoRa (the physical layer) is great for custom networks. But LoRaWAN (the MAC layer protocol) is what you need for: ...
Week 9 represents a fundamental shift in the project. For the past eight weeks, we’ve been building IoT systems - MQTT, InfluxDB, Grafana, cloud-oriented architectures. Week 9 is different. Week 9 is industrial automation. This isn’t about publishing sensor data to the cloud. It’s about PLC integration, SCADA systems, and factory floor protocols. It’s about Modbus TCP - the protocol that’s been running industrial plants since the 1970s. It’s about OPC-UA - the modern standard for industrial interoperability. ...