Caravela, an internet of things startup owned by Stack41, a data center-as-a-service company in Milwaukee, is looking to add a second antenna in the downtown area for its free smart city network.
In 2019, Caravela constructed a low-power, long-range, or LoRa, network that can receive signals from thousands of sensors. Those sensors can be used to detect changes in water and air quality, pressure, movement, vehicle speeds and temperature.
Caravela already has an antenna on top of a building inside the Forest County Potawatomi Community-owned Wgema Campus on Milwaukee’s northside, where Stack41 and Caravela’s offices are located.
With a second antenna, Caravela’s network will cover a majority of Milwaukee, allowing hobbyists, technologists, companies, governments and researchers to collect large amounts of data that can be used to improve the environment and public safety. It can also be used in applications for smart buildings, smart waterways and smart manufacturing, said Ian Favill, president of Stack41.
Potawatomi has attached sensors to the LoRa network to detect leaks in buildings on the Wgema Campus after heavy downpours, Favill said. To his knowledge, Caravela is the lone operator of this kind of free network in the U.S., Favill said.
The current antenna on the Wgema Campus has a radius of three miles, but the second antenna, expected to be installed this fall, would have a range of about four miles, Favill said.
Rather than use a cellular network, which is costly and absorbs battery power from sensors at a very high rate, Caravela developed its network using LoRa, a wireless radio frequency network. The data gathered by sensors are transmitted to a private, internet-based database that's owned and managed by Caravela.
Because LoRa-enabled sensors require little power, the sensors can run off solar power or last for years on battery power.
