// the find
timmbogner/Farm-Data-Relay-System
A system that uses ESP-NOW, LoRa, and other protocols to transport sensor data in remote areas without relying on WiFi.
FDRS is a mesh networking layer for ESP32/ESP8266 devices that bridges ESP-NOW, LoRa, and MQTT to move sensor data across farms or other areas without WiFi infrastructure. You deploy a chain of cheap ESP32 gateways as repeaters, and your sensor nodes talk to whichever one is in range. Aimed at hobbyists and small-scale agricultural deployments that need something cheaper and simpler than a proper LoRaWAN stack.
The gateway/node abstraction is genuinely clean — nodes don't need to know the network topology, they just send to a MAC address and the gateway chain handles routing. Using RadioLib for LoRa means you get a well-maintained, hardware-agnostic layer instead of rolling your own SPI calls. The example library is unusually thorough: soil moisture, tipping bucket rain gauges, GPS, gypsum blocks — these are real agricultural sensors, not just DHT22 demos. Installing as an Arduino library with a single globals header keeps the config surface small and the getting-started path short.
The routing is static and manually configured — there's no dynamic path discovery, so if a gateway goes down your network has a hard break with no automatic rerouting. No acknowledgment or retry layer at the application level; ESP-NOW has basic ACKs but LoRa hops are fire-and-forget, so packet loss in the field is your problem to detect and handle. Security is effectively absent — no encryption, no authentication on the ESP-NOW or LoRa channels, so anyone with a compatible radio can inject or sniff packets. The project language tag says C but it's actually Arduino C++; the `src/` headers are include-everything-in-one-header style, which makes understanding the actual control flow harder than it needs to be.