Hello everybody 
sorry for my very generic question. I’m quite new to Lora and thrown into a project where I’m not sure what my options are. Still I’d like to figure out the “best” way to go… maybe you can push me in the right direction!
Context:
I’m working for a university and we’d need to monitor temperature and leaf moisture from several (10+) plants in a greenhouse. Ideally we get 60 datapoints per hour per sensor.
For our first test we got a Dragino LLMS01 Sensor, claimed it over at TTN and registered a Datacake account to display and persist the data. We adjusted the sensor to transmit every 1m and thought we’re done… until we learned about TTN Fair Use Policy 
Unfortunately we were so hyped by our first test, that we ordered more hardware: More sensors + a Dragino Gateway DLOS8 (with 4G backhaul option, as we might also use it in the field).
Two main directions we thought of
- Changing the end node firmware to tweak the way data gets send
- Canging the pipeline between the Gateway and Datacake
We had some ideas about sending smaller packet, sending only when data changes etc. We quickly discarded the plan to change the end node firmware, as it seems to be a crazy task. There are fragments of open source code available for similar devices by Dragino but… no.
Changing the pipeline
The DLOS8 has the ability to forward Lora data over MQTT (Datacake offers a broker that accepts this data). We looked into this. It’s working but it seems to be rather inconvinient to setup more than 1-2 devices like that… (every end node need to configured over serial to be in ADB mode instead of OTAA, manual key need to be set, copied over to the gateway, etc.)
When we swap out TTN with Chirpstack? How would we do that? Is there a hosted option? Could we install it directly onto the DLOS8 (it’s runnig OpenWrt)?
Thank you for your time and insights!
Have a good day & all the best from Berlin,
Hans