Helium dot com - IoT LoraWAN?

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Oliver de Peyer

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Jul 7, 2020, 1:23:25 PM7/7/20
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Regarding the recent thread about LoraWAN and fair use, has anybody else been getting adverts on Facebook about an outfit called helium dot com? (Typing it that way to prevent you all getting the same adverts unless you want them!)

The deal is, you buy a LoraWAN hotspot (£450) which you must provide an internet connection for.
Any local IoT devices can then access your hotspot.
Whilst the hotspot is plugged in and running, it mines for a cryptocurrency called Helium.
Helium can be redeemed for LoraWAN airtime for your own IoT devices.

Does this seem reasonable?
I imagine the main ripoff is the £450 initial cost. But it might actually be more useful to HAB people than most, particularly the airtime quid pro quo.

Searching for it on the inter web, this outfit is usually considered to be on the level. It looks like a more open standard than Amazon Sidewalk, which is another LoraWAN effort only more “walled garden” (also, Sidewalk uses the 900mhz band which we don’t have access to here?)

I was quite intrigued by this since it does something useful (and quite egalitarian) with your broadband when you are not using it for instance.

Useful or not? What do you guys think?

BW

Olly

M0LVR

Steve

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Jul 7, 2020, 1:33:22 PM7/7/20
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Not sure what you get for your £450 - but it seems like a rip off to me
- you can get a full loRaWAN gateway for about £250 - or you can build a
single/dual channel packet forwarder for less than £50 or re-use a PITS
LoRa gateway for LoRaWAN for free.

I doubt hotspot will have enough compute power to do much cryptocurrency
mining.

    Steve
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John Laidler

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Jul 7, 2020, 2:38:30 PM7/7/20
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My understanding of Bitcoin is it now costs more in electricity to mine a coin than it is worth. This is why some Bitcoin mining operations have moved to Iceland where the geothermal electricity is very cheap.

This may also apply to other crypto-currencies as well. 

The other option for them is to use electricity they don't have to pay for. 😀 My suspicion is this deal does indeed mine for something but what is the guarantee the owner of the hardware will benefit from the mined discoveries?

John

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Kev Walton

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Jul 7, 2020, 3:01:59 PM7/7/20
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Hi Steve

For note to those that might be considering a gateway, I am told you can get a full loraWAN device for much less than £250.  I was recommended the TTIG868 at £75 as a full 8 channel gateway:


and very easy to make it use an external aerial:


Cheers
Kev

Steve

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Jul 7, 2020, 4:29:43 PM7/7/20
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That's a lot cheaper that the last gateway I bought a year or so ago.  Looks like its worth a punt.

    Steve

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David Akerman

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Jul 7, 2020, 5:24:14 PM7/7/20
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It looks to have just an internal antenna, but that's connected to the receiver via an IPEX socket so all you need to do for HAB use is open the case, disconnect the antenna and replace with an IPEX to SMA lead, drill a hole in the case, mount the SMA socket and connect to a antenna mounted outside the house.

Dave

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Nick McCloud

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Jul 7, 2020, 5:52:24 PM7/7/20
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The "The Things Indoor Gateway" is a nice plug n play device which I use in the house for the nodes scattered about. Otherwise there are RAKwireless gateways for ~£125.

Please Steve, do not make a single channel gateway unless you run it shielded at home - it can seriously mess with other nodes uplinks, particularly if they join via your gateway.

The Helium network is even worse than Oliver describes. You setup a separate mining server which earns you credits for use of the Helium network and it also does some other things that I lost the will to live with reading about as it's just too messed up.

Also, most importantly, almost all the gateways are in the US, getting one for here will leave you very very lonely.


Steve

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Jul 7, 2020, 5:53:55 PM7/7/20
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Probably what I would do too - It would certainly be useful for testing at home and in the chase car.

    Steve

David Brooke

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Jul 8, 2020, 5:43:02 AM7/8/20
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On Tue, Jul 07, 2020 at 02:52:24PM -0700, Nick McCloud wrote:
> The "The Things Indoor Gateway" is a nice plug n play device which I use in
> the house for the nodes scattered about. Otherwise there are RAKwireless
> gateways for ~£125.

As I already use a fair bit of MikroTik kit for wired/wireless networks
I thought I'd just throw in another option. I've not used it but if I do
set up an outdoor gateway I'd likely do so.

https://linitx.com/search.php?keywords=lorawan

David

Stuart Robinson

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Jul 8, 2020, 6:10:41 AM7/8/20
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Dont mention the so called single packet forwarders in the TTN forum, definetly not recommended.

They (TTN) will maintain that they can disrupt coms between TTN compliant nodes and the supported 8 channel gateways.

Steve

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Jul 8, 2020, 9:49:02 AM7/8/20
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Yeah - I got that impression when doing searches- still I only used my packet forwarders in the house for testing and briefly out at the launch and landing sites where there is no TTN coverage.

I thought the full gateways were a lot more expensive than they currently are - they certainly were a lot more expensive a year or so back.

Incidentally I was actually using 3 x dual packet forwarders - covering a total of 6 of the 8 channels.

    Steve


On 08/07/2020 11:10, Stuart Robinson wrote:
Dont mention the so called single packet forwarders in the TTN forum, definetly not recommended.

They (TTN) will maintain that they can disrupt coms between TTN compliant nodes and the supported 8 channel gateways.

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