14 docs tagged with "Application"

This was written in late 2020/early 2020 for folks curious about optimizing a Helium Hotspot placement. Some statements are out of date, though the meat of it all is generally correct.

For a little under $8,000 you can have your own very capable private AI at home that you can feed data to and get answers from.

The Rabbit r1 launched to great fanfare on January 9th, but nobody I knew really understood what to use it for. It was one of those "Holy shit, that thing is rad, but..what does it do again?" moments.

I got into Helium to deploy and use a LoRa Wide Area Network (you can read about that here). Along with everyone else, I then got caught up in the wild gold rush of '20-'21, deploying hotspots and earning HNT, helping clients do the same, and occasionally just looking around and wondering at the madness of it all. While that was fun, and an incredibly profitable excuse to get out into some of my favorite parts of the backcountry in San Diego, that run is over and I can finally return to the reason I found and started with this project: Sensors.

Over at Meteo Scientific (the business unit I started to run an IoT Sensor as a Service, or iSaaS), I've been working on a few projects, one of them around measuring vernal pools in the mountains.

Let's start with the basics: What the heck is a Helium Integration, and why would you even need one?

Diving deeper over at Meteo Scientific on this plant nursery project, we wanted to blast out of the gate with something we thought would be incontrovertibly useful. For a nursery in the coastal desert environment of San Diego (albeit with local micrometeorological conditions), keeping track of soil moisture in all the pots seemed like a good start.

One of many extraordinary aspects of being alive in 2023 is access to resources. In this case, it was access both to a 3D printer (a Prusa Mk3S+ I assembled from the kit) and finding design talent to get maximum value of the printer. Before we get there though, let's start at the beginning.

Way back in February of 2022, I wrote a Helium Foundation grant to deploy people counters on a trail here in San Diego. The grant was approved, I used the first tranche to buy the devices, and then ran into a series of obstacles that are common enough in this world of business, IoT, and interaction with various local governments that it's worth sharing them.

On Nov 2nd, my bride Lee & I set off to 4 cities in Europe to conduct a Helium Foundation project called "Helium In The Wild" with three goals.

As any project progresses from a good idea to first implementations and moves closer and closer to commercial viability, the nature of access to the project will change. Typically you start off by giving away access for free, just so people can try the thing out. Helium's LoRaWAN (as all DePIN projects do) went a step further, and issued tokens for those who were willing to put up a gateway, in Helium parlance called a "Hotspot".

In less than 2 years, a group of strangers has managed to deploy 700,000+ Helium Hotspots worldwide. We've got the worlds largest contiguous wireless network built. So, uh, what do we do with it?

This is a project taking you through the basics of how to use the Helium LoRaWAN for projects around the home. Relax, we won't be automating your entire house and accidentally unleashing Terminator. This is just a very simple start into using Helium.

Helium opened the door for a lot of us into the world of LoRaWAN, which stands for Long Range Wide Area Networks. After all the excitement of getting up Hotspots (technically, "gateways") up to earn HNT for providing coverage, we're left asking, "What can you do with Helium?"