Hubs on OGLAS — Off-Grid Local Alert System

LoRa Hub

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS LoRa Hub is the simplest way to start, and the default for most sites. It sits on a shelf in the shed or office, listens for sensor messages over long-range LoRa, and logs everything to local storage. No display required — point Local on a laptop, SBC, or NAS at it and you’ve got the lot.

What it does

Listens for sensor readings from every device in range, confirms back so the sensor knows it got through.
Listens on short-range wireless as well — a shorter-range link that uses less airtime, so nearby sensors save battery and leave the long-range channel clear for the ones that need it.
Stores readings locally to flash / SD / a connected host, in a format you control. Your data, your formats, your backups — see Your data is your data.
Forwards commands — when you want to open a gate or ring a bell, the hub sends the instruction to the right device and collects the response.

Hardware

Purpose-built wireless hardware with long-range LoRa radio. Compact, low-power, designed to sit on a shelf and run 24/7.

Mesh Hub

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS Mesh Hub is for sites where a straight radio line from sensor to hub doesn’t exist. Instead of every device needing to reach the hub directly, devices (and dedicated repeaters) relay for each other — a reading hops node to node until it lands at the hub.

When you want mesh

Broken line-of-sight — a hill, a steel shed, a tree line, or a fold in the ground sits between a sensor and the hub.
Sprawling sites — the far corners are past the range of a single LoRa link, but there are devices in between to carry the signal.
Resilience — if one path goes down, traffic finds another way through the mesh rather than a sensor simply going silent.

What it does

Collects from the mesh — confirms readings and logs them locally, exactly like the LoRa Hub, but the messages arrive via one or more hops.
Self-heals — nodes discover neighbours and re-route automatically as devices come and go or conditions change.
Mixes sensors and repeaters — most OGLAS sensors can carry mesh traffic for their neighbours; add low-cost repeaters to bridge the gaps that have no sensor of their own.

Trade-offs, honestly

Mesh buys coverage at the cost of a little latency and power — each hop adds a small delay, and relaying nodes can’t sleep as deeply as a leaf sensor talking straight to a hub. For most sites that’s a fair trade for reaching the spots a single link can’t. If you can see the hub from everywhere, the LoRa Hub is simpler.

Satellite Hub

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS Satellite Hub is for the genuinely remote: a site with no mobile coverage, no fixed line, and no neighbour to bounce off. It collects sensor data on site like any other hub — and when you want that data off the site, it goes up over satellite rather than a telco.

When you want satellite

No coverage at all — back-country properties, offshore and coastal fishing, remote pump and bore sites, anywhere the phone says “no service”.
Off-site visibility from nowhere — you still want to glance at the site from your phone, even though the site itself has no terrestrial link.
Critical alerts that must get out — an out-of-water or equipment-fault alert that can’t wait for you to drive back into coverage.

What it does

Collects locally first — every reading still lands in on-site storage and feeds Local analysis, the same as any hub. Satellite is the exit, not a dependency for the system to work.
Sends a considered subset up — satellite airtime is precious, so the hub is configured to forward what matters: alerts, summaries, and the cadence of data you actually need remotely, rather than every raw sample.
Feeds Cloud — what goes up becomes your private off-site copy, viewable from a phone and shareable on your terms.

Trade-offs, honestly

Satellite is the most expensive transport per message and the most power-hungry, so it’s used deliberately: collect everything locally, send up only what earns the airtime. For sites that have any other path out — LTE, Wi-Fi, even HaLow — that’s usually the cheaper Cloud route. Satellite is the answer when there’s no other way.

Large display

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS large display is a hub with an LCD bolted on — the version you mount on a wall or in the office and walk past every morning to check the site at a glance.

What it shows

The screen is large enough to scroll through every sensor on your network without compromise:

Page 1 — gate state, latest bell trigger, last Vehicle Track arrival.
Page 2 — water troughs and tank levels with thresholds highlighted, plotted on a paddock map from the trough GPS coordinates.
Page 3 — electric-fence status across every monitored segment, with pulse-rate trend.
Page 4 — every analog node with its current reading, battery voltage, and time since last update.
Page 5 — Smart Switch state and current draw per switched load.
Page 6 onwards — power management (MPPT) data, weather, anything else you’ve wired in.

Pages cycle automatically, or you can pin one with the rotary encoder on the side.

Small display

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The OGLAS small display is a hub trimmed down to a desk-sized footprint — the handful of readings you actually look at every day, on a screen that stays out of the way the rest of the time. It comes in two sizes.

Tiny

The Tiny is about as small as a useful readout gets: a stick-sized OLED showing three values at a glance. The photo is a power example — battery 24.2 V, 122 W, 300 Wh — but the slots are configurable to whatever you check most: