Hi, I’m trying to find, ideally a UK stockist or at least EU stockist of a very simple light sensor. I need something i can attached to or mount very close to an external light so i can monitor if the light is working or not, also need to be external. Rather than relying on someone to tell us a bulb has gone we thought we would use our LoraWan network with a sensor to keep tabs on things.
I have spend some time trying to find such a sensor but most seem to be part of other sensors such as temp, humidity etc and hence pushes the price up.
If anyone can suggest such a sensor i woudl appreciate it.
For an actual “sensor” you might look at something like an LDR, photocell, etc. The world or Arduino project ecommerce is full of such things.
But of course there’s more to a LoRaWAN node than just a sensor - you need the Semtech LoRa radio, an MCU, a power solution, and some strategy for preserving the information that must be preserved for LoRaWAN to keep working.
If you are looking at nodes with sensor suites on them, keep in mind that there’s a fair cost to building a product, so even serveral dollars in uneeded sensors may be fairly trivial in the short term. Long run if you need a lot, you could ask a supplier to build you a batch without the uneeded parts populated, and you could ultimately design something with exactly what you need.
If your sensor consumes power (most other than a “solar cell” would) and your node is battery powered, then you probably want to only bring up the sensor very briefly shortly before each periodic uplink.
Another strategy for monitoring a light may be to look at current flowing through it.
How do you want the system to tell you the light isn’t working? Email, text message or a faux lightbulb on a nice plinth that comes on when the remote bulb fails? Or, as you already have a network, do you have an alerting mechanism?
I’ll message you details on where you can get one for free for trial purposes - you do have to pay for shipping though but it’s not usually much.