Category: Application

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

    Reports From The Field: Helium In The Wild — Lisbon

    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…

  • The Race to Usage Domination — The Gun Has Gone Off!

    The Race to Usage Domination — The Gun Has Gone Off!

    “Inno­vate, be relent­less, and make the net­work usage grow” says Robert Putt, an ear­ly Heli­um adopter and LoRaWAN expert. Rob wrote one of the most use­ful arti­cles on get­ting your Hotspot off relay (back when that was an issue) and has spent years in the LoRaWAN space. He’s now work­ing with the well known BFGNeil…

  • An Off Grid Water Monitoring System

    An Off Grid Water Monitoring System

    I got into Heli­um to deploy and use a LoRa Wide Area Net­work (you can read about that here). Along with every­one else, I then got caught up in the wild gold rush of ’20-’21, deploy­ing hotspots and earn­ing HNT, help­ing clients do the same, and occa­sion­al­ly just look­ing around and won­der­ing at the mad­ness…

  • The People Counter Project: Beginnings

    The People Counter Project: Beginnings

    In less than 2 years, a group of strangers has man­aged to deploy 700,000+ Heli­um Hotspots world­wide. We’ve got the worlds largest con­tigu­ous wire­less net­work built. So, uh, what do we do with it? I got into Heli­um because I thought it could be use­ful to track paraglid­ers back in Sep­tem­ber of 2020. Like many peo­ple,…

  • A Rough Guide To Helium Hotspot Placement

    This was writ­ten in late 2020/early 2020 for folks curi­ous about opti­miz­ing a Heli­um Hotspot place­ment. Some state­ments are out of date, though the meat of it all is gen­er­al­ly correct. Most start with their anten­na, which is (almost com­plete­ly) the wrong approach for max­i­miz­ing earn­ings. The only way you could make a less effi­cient…