Evolution of Usage on the Helium IoT Network

In an article written in 2022, following an unwarranted and poorly executed attack that reduced the value of the Helium network to the nascent consumption of data, erroneously overvalued at $6600, I began monitoring the usage of the network over the months.

To give some context, Helium is a DAO governing the operation of several networks: LoRaWan (IoT), CBRS (4/5G), and WiFi. A DAO is a distributed organization using blockchain to govern its operational processes. This project is one of the pioneers of what we now call DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks), which bridge the virtual world of blockchain with the physical world around us and generally translate into service offerings consumable in the traditional economic circuit, competing with equivalent services in the traditional economy.

Helium is the largest deployed LoRaWan network in the world. It is used for roaming by numerous telecom operator networks and natively by many companies deploying fleets of connected objects. For my part, since 2021, I have been the first to provide commercial and open access to individuals and businesses to this network to connect their objects, through the service Helium IoT Console delivered by IngeniousThings. For this reason, I pay particular attention to monitoring usage on the IoT network.

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Let’s Get Started with Helium & RAK11300 (RP2040 + SX1262)

In this blog post, we are going to see the steps to get started on Helium, with Chirpstack LNS using a RAK11300 module on a RAK wisblock board.

We are just going to setup a device with a LoRaWAN heartbeat to display it on Chirpstack.

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IoT slide deck 2023-07 update

Two years since I did not published my IoT slide deck. Here is the new version, now about 345 slides about IoT topics including Sigfox, LoRaWan, Helium and much more. In this edition, you will also find some slide about the digital transformation impact on the society and the environmental impact.

All the slides on this deck can be freely reused for any educational content; Most of them are also used in my different MooC you can fin on my Youtube IoT Channel

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Access Helium Off-Chain PoC on AWS

With the Solana migration, the Helium ETL has became obsolete, the Proof of Coverage (PoC) data are not anymore on the chain but they can be publicly accessed from an AWS bucket. We are going to see how to access these data and what I’m developing to manage them.

Discover my github project to manage Helium Off-Chain POC data

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Seeed WioTerminal AI grove camera

In this tutorial, we will see how to make an image clustering based AI with the Seeed Wio Terminal and the Grove AI camera. There are different tutorial on this, the main source of this tutorial is located here. The purpose of this is to have a step by-step approach for my student to realize this in a limited time they have.

This is based on SeeedStudio K1100 development kit.

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Deploy Dragino LPS8 (DATAONLY) on Helium

LPS8

The Dragino LPS8, LoRaWAN gateway is a helium ready device you can add to Helium as a Data-Only. It means it does not participate to PoC but earn HNT for transferring traffic.

It’s not a ready-to-go data-only, so you need to register the hotspot in the helium block-chain on your own but it run the gateway-rs software internally.

This device as been designed for Helium, but not only, it can be connected to TTN or another different network, like a private network. The installation with Helium network is not really complicated but you will need to process some command on a terminal and manipulate wallet-cli.

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Installing ChirpStack LoRaWan network server for Helium

ChirpStack is an open-source LoRaWAN network server that is being use in a coming future with Helium as a replacement of the console. This blog post explains how to install it with the companion solution I’ve built to interact with Helium router.

This blog post requires you to own an OUI.

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Repair broken Nebra indoor with eMMC failure

The first versions of Nebra indoor miner came with CM3 (Raspberry Pi Compute Module) embedding eMMC memory. As you may know, Helium has been really I/O intensive, particularly this summer when the blockchain was filling really fast the small amount of storage the CM3 has. As a consequence, all my Nebra indoor miner dead around the same week. Diagnostic seemed to be a storage failure.

Here is the story about making them live again

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