94 docs tagged with "Helium"

Got a question about Helium? Which miner is best? How are rewards calculated? What antenna should you get? How much will you earn? Where should you put your hotspot?

At the beginning of Helium's LoRaWAN, the ability to route a packet from a device through the Hotspot network to wherever you wanted it to go was a service provided either Helium Inc or eventually, the Helium Foundation. That routing happened through the Helium Console, which was a custom built LNS (LoRaWAN Network Server). An LNS is the thing that manages all the packets of data on a LoRaWAN.

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 Some statements are out of date, though the meat of it all is generally correct.

During this transition to Light Hotspots, which has been predictably uncertain, it hit me that many, if not most of the people who have been buying Helium Hotspots and deploying them don't have a strong understanding of the system.

From Nov 4th through 17th of 2022, Gristle King Inc conducted the Helium In The Wild tour on behalf of the Helium Foundation.  This idea was conceived, developed, and supported by Nik Hawks, Joey Hiller and Scott Sigel to help get boots on the ground off US soil and demonstrate the Helium Foundation’s commitment to building the IoT network.

The Helium Network demonstrated just how powerful tokenized radio coverage could be, and a host of other companies are rolling out wireless networks, from WiFi to satellite to cell, using token incentives. GEODNET is one of those companies.

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.

Having trouble understanding why your hotspot isn't getting a Witness? Are you seeing messages about being above or below the bounds of an RSSI metric? Let's dig in!

Now that Helium has shown the world how to deploy a global network of physical devices at a low capex, and Hivemapper, GEODNET, and WeatherXM (among many others) following suit, what should we expect to see in the next year?

I sat down with Vishal from HeliumHiker to go through his pretty rad set of tools for getting deep into a Helium hotspot. I first found Vishal through using his Challenge Receipt Analysis dashboard which is my go-to tool for checking my hotspots and make sure they're singing. Looks like I might need to dig into this one and sort out the invalid witness issue...

Are Helium Hotspots dangerous to be around? How much RF energy do they emit? Should you or your hosts be worried about the exposure levels? Let's run through the facts, then you can make your own decision.

"Do you worry about your off grid hotspot getting stolen?"  I get that question a lot.  My short answer is "No".  In general, I follow what I consider a few security best practices:

Let's go through seven aspects of why stopping cheating, also known as gaming, on the Helium Network is so damn difficult. I know, I know, you just want an answer or \someone\ to do \something\.

I got a chance to sit down with the mighty @BFGNeil recently and boy did I learn a ton! Neil is one of my fellow Helium Discord moderators and one of the most helpful and knowledgeable members of the community.

It's been a heck of a ride so far, from the beginnings of looking for a better way to find lost paraglider pilots all the way out to being featured by Helium as a top hotspot optimization expert.

Got questions about what kind of cable you should use to connect your Helium hotspot to your antenna? Want a Helium-specific cable loss table?

Helium is a complex system. If you don't understand it, that complexity can be REALLY frustrating.

Our pilot project is complete, and boy have we learned a ton from this one! While many are still focusing on earning HNT for Helium Hotspot deployments, the obvious move for those of us interested in longevity is actually USING the Network.

HIP 70 is simple. We (the Helium Community) are moving from doing everything ourselves to farming out a few things to experts. Here's what it looks like.

Ready to push hard into IoT outside of the US? Meet Helium In the Wild!

Let's start with the basics: When it comes to Helium, most people radically underestimate the importance of Placement and get distracted by antennas and cables. If that's you, read the Rough Guide to set you straight.

It's one of the most confusing aspects of Helium; you put up your hotspot in an "empty" res 8 hex, but you still get your transmit rewards scaled. Why is that, and what can you do about it?

The Hotspotty team was gracious enough with their time to walk me through some significant improvements of their Helium tool.

How do you know if a new blockchain + meatspace (B+M) project (like Helium, or GEODNet, or Planetwatch) is likely to succeed? What are the key indicators of success or failure?

This is a general explanation of how gamers are stealing HNT on the network. This is not a "how to". Most of us putting up Helium Hotspots have no idea how the system works. It can feel frustrating to be cheated and not understand it. Let's go through a few of the more common methods. These methods are getting easier for Helium Inc (and the community at large) to detect, but are still very difficult to stop with a set of programmatic rules in the code.

Well, the race is officially on. With at least two unofficial halvings coming in the near future, it's pretty darn important right now to:

How small can you build an off grid miner? Can everything fit in one backpack? How light can that pack be? Finally, why would you want a tiny off grid miner?

After I did the statistics video with Matthew Patrick, I heard from @cryptofulness via Twitter. He reached out from Portugal to offer some help with a "t-test implementation" to test some Hotspots. If you remember, a "t-test" compares two sets of data and tells you whether or not there's actually a meaningful result.

One of the most frequently asked questions in all of the Helium space is: “How much will I earn?”

Getting the most out of a Helium hotspot deployment requires a strategy to maximize your placement, antenna elevation, and then physically deploying the thing.

The constant question with Helium is, "How much will my hotspot earn?" While I've covered the strategy for maximizing that in other posts, it sure is nice when you have a tool that helps dial in your accuracy. HotspotRF aims to be one of those tools, and when it first came out I sat down with the owner, Aidan Curry, to walk through how to use it. That interview is at the bottom of this post, but I thought I'd check in on the tool and see what's new. As it turns out, a TON!

How do you manage your Hotspot if it's at someone else's location? Whether there's a formal "Host Agreement" or it's your Aunt Sally, having the ability to remote in to your Hotspot's dashboard and do anything from a quick check on the latest transactions all the way to a reset or reboot, it's nice to have that ability.

Ready to go deep on optimizing your hotspot? This leverages the fundamentals of WUPU and assumes you have more than a passing knowledge of Helium. I'll pull back the curtain a little bit and share examples of the strategies I use. The list of strategies covered in this post is at the bottom, under the Terms, Tools, and Strategies (TTS) section.

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.

Want to get your hotspot up on that tall commercial building, but you're not sure how to approach the building owner or manager? I'll walk you through how I do it, including templates and how to talk about Helium with non-crypto enthusiasts. I know, I know. You want to skip forward to right before you tilt up the tower, like this:

Helium is a gateway into the world of RF, or radio frequency. While the easiest thing to do when you get your hotspot is just plug it in and set it in a window, most of the time you'll earn far more if you optimize a bit. Most of those optimizations are focused on improving the RF signal your hotspot can beacon (also called "transmitting") as well as improving the ability of your hotspot to witness (also called "receiving".)

Sometimes ya just gotta see it being done to learn it. Here's the best I can do to bring you on the journey of setting up a hotspot. This is the story of Thankful Caramel Quail. The full gear list for this install is here, including options & alternates.

You can secure a great location, but it does take work. Here's the way I approach securing great locations using a step by step method to radically improve my chances of success. I've done this wrong, and I've done this right. I've watched other people make mistakes and I've also watched other people absolutely nail this. Want to learn from my mistakes and drastically improve your chances for getting a great earning Helium location? Here we go!

With a generous assist from the folks over at HNTenna, here's a step by step method for setting up your RUT 240 (the cell modem that allows an off grid Helium Hotspot to connect to the internet.)

It seems pretty straightforward; generate power and a connection to the internet, and you've got an off grid Helium Hotspot setup. Still, you'll have a few minor details to sort out, like what type of enclosure, how to mount it, how to make sure it stays weatherproof if you use an external antenna, and how to vent it.

Helium is a rapidly growing and wild ecosystem. Like any other new ecosystem, things are constantly changing, and the main sources of information most new users rely on (Explorer and the Helium app) can be up 48 hours behind.

Mapping is big business.  From 2016-2018, Uber paid Google $58 million for the use of Google's maps.  That's $53,00 per DAY.  Mapping, of course is a data flow technology, and where data flows, money goes.  You and I, as "normal people" are just beginning to be able to tap into these pervasive data flows around us.  From our personal data to the data we can generate just by interacting with the world around us, we are surrounded by a flood of data.

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

One of the great opportunities of a ubiquitous wireless network like Helium's LoRaWAN is in monitoring parking. While parking may seem slightly less interesting than day-old oatmeal to most of us, the more you know about parking the more you wonder why we don't pay far more attention to it.

Hotspotty started as a way for Daniel Andrade (@spillere on Discord) to manage the growing fleet of Helium Hotspots he was rolling out together with Maxime Goossens and Alexis Argent.

How do you use PoE? Do you need a splitter, an injector, or both? How does it all work?

So you've read the piece on the Helium Bridge and you want to use one to bring your favorite non-LoRaWAN sensor data onto the Helium Network? Rad!

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.

The most important person reading this may be non-technical. While technical expertise is critical to accomplish the goals set out below, much of the initial work done will be "imagination work", trying to figure out how we as a community want to work with, in, and around a new form of access into Helium.

As we all begin the next mad rush to deploy Helium 5G miners, one of the questions I hear asked is, "Is 5G safe?"

I got into Helium accidentally. I was looking for a way to find and communicate with other paragliders out back of beyond. I had participated in a Search and Rescue for a well known paraglider out in remote Nevada at the end of summer 2020.

A few months ago, Ann at Bobcat reached out to see if I'd like a hotspot for review. She'd read the Rough Guide To Hotspot Optimization article and liked it. She thought it might be useful to get a Bobcat hotspot into my hands ahead of the wave of normal production. I thought so too. I don't think she expected me to do anything other than plug it in and earn HNT and talk about it, but...that's not what I did.

While many of you are hammer and tongs at the game of deploying hotspots, the real opportunity is beginning to shift from \building\ the network to \using\ the network.

It's been a little over a year since I started deploying Helium Hotspots. In that year, after deploying Hotspots both on grid and off grid on homes, commercial buildings, and (my favorite) in the mountains, I've learned a ton about what to do, what not to do, and how to make the most of the Helium experience.

One of the core benefits of a global LoRaWAN network like Helium is the ability to track assets across a large area. Now, tracking isn't magic, it's engineering, and it always comes down to fundamentals: How are you getting your location? How long do you need your tracker to run? How often should it ping?

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.

What the heck is a Helium Light Hotspot, and why does it matter? If you're not tech savvy, the whole thing can seem confusing. Let's clear it up.

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.

"The job right now isn't to make IoT easy. It's to make it work".

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.

I recently drove up to participate in the USA Hike & Fly's Ojai race on October 31st, both as an athlete and a provider of tracking with Helium. The athlete side was fun, but expensive. I landed in the bushes and tore up my wing enough to warrant buying a new one. Not cheap. Still, rad to blast up the backside of the range then launch off the ridge in an attempt to fly the course instead of hike it.

What is a downlink, why would you want one, and how can you use 'em? With Helium being a permissionless network, we're going to have a ton of people who are not LoRa wizards trying to use a LoRaWAN, including downlinks. I thought I'd write up a few articles on how to solve some of the frustrating obstacles you might find as you continue your Helium journey. This should help the average user get a hold of one lever in this high technology world called "the downlink". We'll start off with some background, explain a little about how it works and give some examples of how you might use it.

How do you attach a lightning arrestor to your Helium hotspot antenna? What does one look like? Is it dangerous?

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".

Do you have the best antenna for your location? What kind of coverage is your Helium Hotspot providing? Is the location you've identified as good on Helium.Vision actually that good?

What tools will you need to install Helium Hotspots? After putting up Hotspots on houses, buildings, mountains, and poles, and spending more money than I'd like to admit on all kinds of tools, I thought I'd put together a list for you to find all of 'em in one place. No matter how basic or advanced you want to get, the tool you need to find for an excellent Helium deployment is somewhere on this list. Let's get started!

At the recent TIPIN Summit put on by Lattice Capital, it became apparent that blockchain + meatspace projects are about to hit the mainstream of the cryptogalaxy.

Once you've built the world's largest LoRaWAN network, the next step is clearly to use it. Still, it can be hard to use a network that doesn't yet have an absolute boatload of sensors ready for it.

There's almost no good reason to use the CLI (Command Line Interface) wallet for a normal person, but...not everyone who gets into Helium is normal. If, like me, you're faced with having to use it, this series of instructions might help.

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?

Now that Helium is on Solana, what's next? Let's start with the big ones: All actions are now way faster than they were. Need to transfer tokens to someone? Should take about 30 seconds. Want to update info on your Hotspot? Same time. No more waiting 40 minutes or a few hours, or even a few days for actions you take to happen.

So you just found out about Helium and want to crush it with your hotspot deployment? First, remember WUPU. That stands for Wide-Unique-Proveable-Useful coverage. WUPU is what makes for a reliably high earning hotspot. Here are the top 5 things that go against WUPU. Let's start with the worst thing:

TL;DR Despite a massive change to the Network, at a macro level we're more or less where we were (up 3%) with the number of Hotspots getting rewarded for beaconing, and down 4% for number of Hotspots getting rewarded for witnessing. The rewards themselves are lower, but that's always the long term trend of any crypto mining network.

We're about to make one of the largest migrations ever done on a blockchain, from one L1 to another. Sure, there have been other large migrations, but this is easily the largest ever seen in the DePIN space. With that that as our framework, let's talk about the reasons for the move, the challenges we face, the opportunities on Solana, and what your expectations for the move might reasonably be.

Ready to fix relayed status on your Helium Miner? @Jason (Jason#8116) over on Discord built a giant and truly glorious workflow for getting through it, but I'll be honest: It's intimidating to the first timer.

Over the course of the past year, we've all learned how to maximize the deployment of a LoRa Helium miner. It's been a fun run as we sorted through the vital parts of a high earning deployment:

How hard is it to deploy a Helium 5G miner? There are at least three aspects to this: Physical, Legal, and Risk/Reward. Let's start with the easiest one, which is the physical installation.

Ok, so you've deployed your first hotspot or two, figured out how a wallet works and where to send your HNT to convert to local currency (or you're hodling.)

It's a warm sunny day just west of and about 1,600 feet above Lake Elsinore, at a paragliding launch site unimaginatively called "The E". A few of us are getting ready to launch off the steep face of the hill to ride thermals and the wind. Our "plan A" today is to see if we can fly a giant triangle in the sky, at least 50 km. Plan A doesn't happen.

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.

Ok, so you just found Helium and are wondering what to do next? Let's walk through the whole system so you'll know what to do and what NOT to do. We'll go through the ecosytem of Helium, the incentive of HNT, explain Helium Wallets as well as the Burn and Mint equilibrium, and make sure you get started the right way the first time.

With the rise of Helium, many of us were introduced to the new concept of combining a blockchain application with actual physical real world usage and tokenizing the incentives. I call that combo blockchain + meatspace, and Helium is just the beginning.

We're switching over to Solana as our Layer 1 (L1 for the cool kids). What does that mean for you, a Hotspot owner?

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?"

40-60 Hotspots, all about 1,500m away from any other, with any one of 'em having clear line of sight to at least 30 others.

Seeing other deployments is one of the fastest ways to get great ideas (and avoid costly mistakes!)

Short version: Use a low gain antenna, report your location and antenna gain accurately. If you're in the US, this isn't a big deal, as our radios pump out enough power to get excellent range even with a low gain antenna. If you're in a region (UK, EU, etc) where your radio output is low, PoCv11 will probably decrease your range significantly.

So you're into crypto and you just discovered HNT? Let's go through the basics so you can decide whether or not you want to jump into the world of Helium.

Helium is the project that started it all, but the DeWi space is rapidly growing. With that growth come questions, mysteries, and opportunities. New players, both known and unknown, are entering the mix. As the idea of 5G starts to really get legs, one question you should constantly be asking yourself is, "What is the state of the space?" I'm glad you asked...

"Will this antenna work?" I get that question a lot, usually about some antenna that was discovered after hours of searching and sifting through Google results. Antennas are one of the most confusing parts of Helium, mostly because RF is fairly complicated and the average hotspot owner has as much experience with antenna design and theory as a warthog does with wearing Kiton tuxedos.

Here is a step by step method for understanding how to choose the best antenna for your hotspot placement. Each placement demands a well matched antenna in order to provide value to the Helium Network and consequently earn the most HNT possible for that location. Do NOT, by the way, try to get the giant antenna in the picture below. While it looks huge and cool and rad, it is the wrong antenna to use for these deployments. I spent a fair amount of blood and treasure to learn that lesson. You don't need to.

Why will a Hotspot earn well on one day, then nothing the next?  Why isn’t there more consistency in earnings?

The recently-opened-for-beta-testers Helium Wallet app is not the Helium app; that's the first confusing thing. The Wallet app is all about keeping control of your 12 words in YOUR hands, and no one else's. Outside of the Helium Wallet app, you should NEVER give your 12 (or 24) words to anyone. Per.i.od.

So you've got your Helium Hotspot up and cranking and you're all proud of your new deployment. Well done you!