March 8th Meeting Notes
Alexander Maidak
QCLUG March 8, 2022 Meeting Notes
The LUG meeting begins promptly at 18:40 as normal
Attendees:
- Bob S
- John
- Devon
- Chirstian
- Alex
- Chris C
Bob is presenting on PCIe NVMe SSD Information
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Bob says that PCIe NVMe is very high performance
Why would you want an NVMe SSD?
- The card is very small - 1"x3" saves a lot of space for the manufacturer.
- Strong performance
- No need for a SATA HBA
NVMe = non-volatile memory pcie
M.2 != NVMe, M.2 can support USB3.0, SATA and PCIe; most early M.2 slots support only SATA!
MSATA looks like m.2 but is not, beware!
PCIe x2 NVMe SSDs were B-keyed
PCIe x4 SSDe are M-Keyed - the current mainstream option.
Some PCIe slots support both B and M
Check your slot if you’re going upgrade
Bob shared a visual of the different ssds
Apple was an early adopter of NVMe SSD and pretty much you only find b-key on apple
m2. 2280 = 22mm wide by 80mm long
2242, 2260 are different sizes. You need to make sure you can fit your card in your slot, likely
exactly.
m.2 2280 typical sizes:
128gb, 256gb, 512gb, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB
NVMe SSD throughput is high, 6x vs. SATA SSD (500MBps vs 3GBps)
NVMe SSD seek time is very fast Nearly .02 ms!
Summary: you want an NVMe SSD if you can afford it.
To add NVMe drives to any computer with a PCIe slot. You want a Gen3 slot and you'll want to
be able to boot it.
There is USB3 <-> NVMe adapters which
Why would you want all this performance:
- Run large scale Finite Element Analysis (FEA)
- High resolution photography and video editing
- Data Acquisition hardware?
Thanks Bob!
Christian on Helium Crypto
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Christian is presenting on Helium Block Chain
USING LibreOffice IMPRESS ON FEDORA 35! Max Respect
Helium Network is a network of hotspots providing LoRaWAN network LongFi
LoRaWAN is designed for IOT purposes
Dog collars
Irragation sensors
etc
Helium Hotspot providers are paid
network coverage
data transfered
HNT - Helium Tokens are to pay for using the Helium network
Must buy Official Hardware approved by the community
- $500 and 12 week lead time
it's a Raspberry Pi with a Radio
Provide Coverage in under-served area
proof-of-coverage
Challenges/Witnesses
Already Getting Saturated
Who is using this network?
IoT Devices - very small data transfer
Talking about small amounts of money to send a small amount of data:
Price is fixed at $0.000001 per packet
$1 per 2.4Mb
Very low bandwidth telemetry data for IoT is basically all it's useful for.
Originally designed for a Scooter company!
With HNT tokens instead of paying the hotspots directly in HtNT users transfer HNT to a "burn" account to acquire data credits
HNT uses a Burn and Mint Model which is somewhat unique
- Customers Buy Tokens which they burn for credits
- credits are distributed to product creators
- product creators mint new tokens to send ot product creators
Once burned, credits are non-transferrable
Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium
HNT price oracles determine how many data credits are issued when 1HNT is burned
223M HNT is max supply
HNT tokens seem to be scammy with the creators getting 35% of the value:
- 30% for network users
- 35% for network creators
- 35% is allocated to Helium IN
How good is the coverage? This exists in the QCA right now!
Chirstian is hosting HNT, but it died. He's making $3 a month doing this. Almost enough for a beer!
What's the catch?
- it's better to resell hotspots than actually host them.
- Right now you'll maybe make $3 a month on this
There is not a lot of optimism on the success of this
Chris:
LoRaWan: is used a lot for private farm equipment like
water systems sensors of irragation etc.
The Amazon sidewalk project was LoRaWAN!!!
Example: you have a smart sensor on a dog color.
You could have every Alexa and ring device as a LoRaWAN device.
Easy to locate the dog!!!
Ring devices are LoRaWAN capable devices. It looks like it will be hard for Helium to compete with Amazon sidewalk and ring devices
Very interesting, Thanks Christian!