The Setup I built a two-node LoRaWAN sensor network on STM32WL55JC1 microcontrollers running Rust/Embassy firmware — the full story is in Part 1. One of the two nodes, lora-2, carries no sensor. Its only job is to send a confirmed uplink every ~10 seconds, display RSSI, SNR, and DR on its OLED, and let the gateway’s InfluxDB record tell the story later. You might wonder why I didn’t just use lora-1 — the sensor node — for this test. Both nodes send a 4-byte payload, so packet size is identical and makes no difference to range. What matters is transmission behaviour: lora-2 sends every uplink confirmed, so a missed ACK is detected within one cycle. lora-1 only confirms every fifth uplink, meaning gateway loss takes much longer to register. lora-2 also transmits every ~10 seconds versus lora-1’s ~30 seconds — three times the data points in InfluxDB, three times the resolution when overlaying against GPS waypoints later. Purpose-built beats repurposed. ...
From Sensor to Dashboard — Without a Line of C My previous projects used the STM32F446RE — a capable workhorse, but one that needs an external LoRa radio module wired up separately. When I decided to go deep on LoRaWAN, I wanted a chip where the radio was part of the silicon itself. The STM32WL55JC1 delivers exactly that: an ARM Cortex-M4 application processor and a sub-GHz radio coexisting on the same die, talking to each other over an internal SPI bus that never leaves the package. ...
When industrial facilities need to monitor equipment and environmental conditions, they often face a challenge: different systems speak different languages. A temperature sensor in one part of the building might use Modbus TCP, while the HVAC system uses BACnet/IP, and wireless sensors communicate via LoRaWAN. Getting all this data into one place typically requires expensive proprietary gateways or complex integration projects. I built a solution that brings these three protocols together on a single platform, using open-source tools and commodity hardware. ...