Costaflores vineyard network: wifi Access Point

Owned by Mike Tango Bravo
Last updated: Aug 24, 2024
3 min read

The weather station is installed under the base of the platform structure, located in the middle of the Costaflores vineyard.

The weather station collects data from local sensors, and from the vinduino sensors, via LoRa radio connections, and all this information, processed by from the weather station, is then relayed via a wifi connection, to the Costaflores internet router, and outwards to costaflores.com web services.

While the distance between the vinduino sensors in the vineyard and the Costaflores internet router, located in the main house, is certainly close enough to rely only on LoRa for communications, we also wanted to have a wifi hotspot on the vineyard platform, and so it made sense to install a point-to-point wifi relay between the houses and the vineyard platform.

To do this, two TP-Link CPE210 2.4GHz are configured.

One CPE210 is mounted atop a light post on the roof of the north-east corner of Santo's house, and pointed toward the vineyard platform.

The second CPE210 is mount on the instrument mast on the vineyard platform.

Each CPE210 has one RJ45 connector for data AND power and a grounding screw.

The CPE210 is cabled with one ethernet cable to the LAN0 (Passive POE) connection port. This POE (Power-over-Ethernet) cable is then connected to a passive POE adapter. 

The passive POE adapter has three connections: 

  • Power (220v)

  • POE (Connects to the CPE210 antennae)

  • LAN (Connects to the Rasperry Pi weather station in the vineyard, and another wifi router in Santos' house)

For the vineyard platform access point, the LAN port is connected directly to the Raspberry Pi weather station. For the antenna above CostafloresHQ, the passive POE adapter LAN port is cabled to a wifi router that is connected to the costaflores wifi network.

 

  1. Before accessing the PharOS Web configuration interface for the CPE210, assign a static IP address 192.168.0.X to your computer. 

  2. Open a web browser: http://192.168.0.254

  3. Enter admin for both User Name and Password 

  4. Change the default password to KIOSKO 

  5. Update the firmware, from here.

  6. For the CostafloresHQ, select Access Point mode from the Quick Setup tab. For the platform router, select Repeater.

 

If you accidentally brick the CPE210 Access Point, as I did (twice), by miss-wiring the PoE cable, follow these instructions:

  1. Download the latest firmware.

  2. Setup a TFTP server with the firmware, renamed as recovery.bin

  3. Reset the Access Point and wait for the firmware to download.

 

CostafloresHQ

 

 

 

Costaflores_Platform