Desenvolvimento de um ecossistema automatizado para monitoramento climático e ambiental no Sertão Central do Ceará: uma abordagem utilizando a tecnologia LoRa

Abstract

This work presents the development and validation of an Internet of Things ecosystem aimed at climatic and environmental monitoring in the Sertão Central region of Ceará, Brazil. The proposed system consists of a low-cost monitoring device, manufactured via 3D printing and controlled by the RP2040 (ARM Cortex-M0+) microcontroller, operating over a LoRaWAN network architecture for long-range data transmission. The system collects temperature, humidity, and precipitation data, transmitting them to a cloud infrastructure based on the FIWARE platform, with real-time visualization via Grafana. Experimental validation addressed three main axes: energy efficiency, communication quality, and rainfall measurement accuracy. Consumption analysis confirmed the effectiveness of low-power strategies, ensuring extended autonomy. Communication tests validated the robustness of the LoRa link across different Spreading Factors (SF), maintaining packet delivery even in obstructed scenarios. In the pluviometric validation, performed through dynamic benchtop rain simulation, the prototype demonstrated high accuracy in light and moderate intensities, identifying a characteristic non-linear divergence in extreme events (> 40 mm/h), caused by the fluid kinetic energy. The results confirm the technical and economic feasibility of the system as a support tool for agriculture and water management. Future works propose the implementation of dynamic compensation algorithms in the firmware to correct errors in torrential rains and the porting to modern architectures such as RISC-V.