Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

Category: Application

  • A Rough Guide to the Rabbit r1

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    by

    Nik
    in

    The Rab­bit r1 launched to great fan­fare on Jan­u­ary 9th, but nobody I knew real­ly under­stood what to use it for. It was one of those “Holy shit, that thing is rad, but..what does it do again?” moments. What is the r1? For my reg­u­lar read­ers, I’ll start with this: It has noth­ing to do…

  • How To Use A Helium Integration

    How To Use A Helium Integration

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    by

    Nik
    in ,

    Let’s start with the basics: What the heck is a Heli­um Inte­gra­tion, and why would you even need one?  An “inte­gra­tion” is what allows the raw data that’s com­ing from your Heli­um sen­sors to be actu­al­ly used. Whether that’s show­ing a dash­board of soil mois­ture, or tem­per­a­ture, or if you’re track­ing the num­ber of peo­ple who…

  • Sunsetting Helium Console — The End of an Era

    Sunsetting Helium Console — The End of an Era

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    by

    Nik
    in ,

    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…

  • Level Up In A Connected World Using 3D Printing

    Level Up In A Connected World Using 3D Printing

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    by

    Nik
    in , ,

    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. Some­time…

  • What devices can you use on Helium?

    What devices can you use on Helium?

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    by

    Nik
    in ,

    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?” One of the best places to start…

  • How Wet Can Ya Get? Let’s Get Muddy!

    How Wet Can Ya Get? Let’s Get Muddy!

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    by

    Nik
    in ,

    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…

  • How To Measure Endangered Vernal Pool Depth Using The Helium Network

    How To Measure Endangered Vernal Pool Depth Using The Helium Network

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    by

    Nik
    in ,

    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.  Ver­nal pools are “one of California’s most endan­gered wet­land nat­ur­al com­mu­ni­ties” accord­ing to Dave Hogan, head of the Chap­ar­ral…

  • People Counter Update: Many Obstacles, Much Learning

    People Counter Update: Many Obstacles, Much Learning

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    by

    Nik
    in ,

    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…

  • Using Helium To Automate Your Home

    Using Helium To Automate Your Home

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    by

    Nik
    in , ,

    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. At the end, if you fol­low all the direc­tions, you’ll have a…

  • Reports From The Field: Helium In The Wild — Lisbon

    Reports From The Field: Helium In The Wild — Lisbon

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    by

    Nik
    in , ,

    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.  First, to see how Heli­um was being used in the wild. Obvi­ous­ly sen­sor usage isn’t huge yet, and lots of b.s. has been thrown around the inter­we­bz…