We were visited recently by DesignSpark — the community guys at RS Components — who came up to talk to us about our work with with LoRaWAN, The Things Network and Flood Network. Following which they went away, worked their magic and managed to produce a video that not only looks fantastic, but transformed our exciting ramblings into a great narrative, if we do say so ourselves!

LoRaWAN is something that I’ve written about a number of times before [1] and is one of those technologies that comes along every once in a while, with the potential to change everything. The people behind The Things Network were quick to realise this and how it could be put to use in underpinning a free and open data network, doing a remarkable job at fostering a vibrant and ever growing community that is committed to building such a network.

Much as we love working with wireless technologies and don’t need much of an excuse to try out new ones, LoRaWAN and The Things Network provided the missing link in an application which could bring significant benefit to the local area: flood monitoring. This is where the Flood Network comes in and we plan to build on the excellent work that they’ve done in Oxford to create a crowdsourced network of sensors. In any case, watch the video for more details:

We still have much more work to do and will be sure to share details via this blog and posts on DesignSpark in due course.

— Andrew

[1]: