ANNOUNCEMENT 

Thank you all for the support I have received over the past year. 

I really appreciate the comments and feedback through this forum and I fully intend to update my content here frequently with useful content as soon as they become available. However due to the format of this platform, it is quite difficult to present small yet important updates, therefore I am creating an Instagram page where I will post my content more regularly and also demonstrate more of the "behind-the-scenes" work that goes into creating my projects. 

You can access my Instagram page here, elektroThing (@elektrothing) • Instagram photos and videos.  For those of you who do not want to use Instagram, I am also launching my website, elektrothing.com, which will serve as the landing page for all things elektroThing. :) 

PROJECT UPDATE

And now for the fun part. 

I have been testing out FLORA over the summer months and I can confirm that it does work over the ESP-NOW protocol up to a distance of around 30m. Which should be fine for your house + garden. I have been able to set up the LoRa hardware with the ESP32 but have yet to run experiments over a larger distance - we might have to wait a few months for the sun too. 

Thus with the downtime, my plan over the next few months is to complete the following; 

1. Improve the SMPS design to boost the efficiencies further.
2. Design a 3D printable housing that has better airflow. 
3. Add connectors to the extra soil moisture sensor so that it can be "plug-and-plug".
4. Develop the firmware so that setup can be done "out of the box" or at least, easier - between sender and receiver modules. At the moment, it involved getting MAC Addresses as it is over ESP-NOW. 
5. Write the same firmware for LoRaWAN.

Do reach out if there is something on this list that you would like to help with. I am more than happy to send over a board and in return get some work off my shoulders.