I've been working in IT for over a quarter of a century. In that time, I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, from traditional enterprise systems to the modern jungle of IoT.
For the past few years, I’ve been dabbling in the Internet of Things, though, let’s be honest, it was mostly Wi-Fi-based gadgets. Fun, but limited. It always felt like there should be more.

A few years ago, I started experimenting with LoRa and LoRaWAN. Back then, I didn’t really have a clear use case, I just wanted to switch a light on and off via radio, just because I could.
But when there’s no real problem to solve, the interest fades as fast as the blinking LED. That’s how it is.

Now, it's June 2025, and it’s brutally hot outside again. As president of our local fishing club, I looked at the big pond in front of my house — 1.1 hectares of calm water — and thought:
  “Surely I can measure and document this. Surely I can automate some of it.”

And so, this project was born.

• Measuring water temperature
• Tracking dissolved oxygen levels
• Using LoRaWAN, no cloud dependencies
• Visualizing everything with Grafana on my own infrastructure

The pond also has an inlet and outlet, and there's a river running between the pond and my house. So there's plenty of opportunity for data, monitoring, automation, and good old-fashioned nerd joy.

Oh, and by the way, there’s already a second project in the works:     outfitting racing rowing boats with sensors and measuring performance with laser trip sensors on open water.

Stay tuned. The IoT World, for me, only just begun.