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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Helium console, is it a $6600 business ?

Some time ago, a twitter thread made the community react about the amount of $6600 of communications consumption on the Helium network. This thread was full of approximations in order to present negatively the growth of the Helium network. But it is also an opportunity to take stock of the development of the use of the network. We will see in this article who operates the Helium decentralized network, what are the current data volumes and what are the associated financial metrics.

In short, we cannot talk about Nova Labs’ revenue with respect to direct communication costs because these costs are associated with different third parties offering the packet routing service. We cannot rely on this cost to estimate an associated business volume because there are many indirect costs as I have already specified in my blog post analyzing the running costs of a Helium router/console. Finally, regarding a long period where gamers found a way to earn a few dollars on the back of Nova Labs, involving many ancillary costs, distorted the data for June. You will understand all this in the rest of the article.

Disclaimer: I’m the owner of the public helium console helium-iot.eu (oui 6) – no need to makes comment like “he have written this because he own … blablabla”

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