From Team Thingsquare Adam Dunkels, Marcus Linderoth, and Fredrik Rosendal via hackster.io

When someone opens the door, be the first to know…

Today we set up a door sensor that sends a notification to your phone when the door is opened, no matter where in the world you are. Because we use the Thingsquare system and off-the-shelf hardware we do not need to do any programming or soldering.

The door sensor consists of one Sensortag and one ordinary magnet.

We use the Sensortag hardware with sub-GHz configuration. Unlike many projects using this hardware, we use IPv6 sub-GHz 6lowpan communication instead of Bluetooth.

The Thingsquare system uses 6lowpan instead of Bluetooth for several reasons:

Longer range: 6lowpan’s sub-GHz radio signals travel much farther than Bluetooth’s 2.4 GHz signals – particularly indoors.

Less interference: the 2.4 GHz Bluetooth frequency band is shared with WiFi, which typically is very crowded. Also, 2.4 GHz signals are effectively stopped by the human body, so performance is degraded when there are people around.

Automatic meshing: with 6lowpan, we automatically get the benefits of meshing, which means that we can extend the range of our system indefinitely.

Built-in low-power operation: we can achieve multi-year lifetime on a single coin-cell battery, while taking advantage of all the above benefits.

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