Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

Helium In The Wild — Start Your Engines!

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by

Nik
in

Ready to push hard into IoT out­side of the US? Meet Heli­um In the Wild!

Start­ing in Novem­ber with Solana Break­point in Lis­bon, Por­tu­gal, I’ll be head­ing out to see how Heli­um is being used in the wild. I’ll be look­ing for and shar­ing lessons, inspi­ra­tions, and inter­views with real peo­ple who are get­ting up to their elbows in this network.

The Heli­um Foun­da­tion is spon­sor­ing this series to show­case how peo­ple are using Heli­um around the world. Yeah yeah yeah, I know, I’ll still do stuff cov­er­ing the use of IoT in the US, but there’s a whole world out there and I want to help YOU see it!

Dri­ving demand is crit­i­cal to the long term suc­cess of Heli­um, and I’m psy­ched to help you fig­ure out how to do it your­self by show­ing you how it’s already being done.

At each place I vis­it, we’ll do some­thing dif­fer­ent to help you learn about Heli­um and con­nect with your local com­mu­ni­ty. It may be learn­ing how to use a sen­sor, an aspect of run­ning a LoRaWAN busi­ness, or any oth­er thing use­ful to you as a user, ser­vice provider, DIY­er, or just an inter­est­ed bystander. We’ll also be run­ning a map­ping con­test called Here Be Drag­ons at a few loca­tions, more on that below.

The cur­rent sched­ule looks like this. For details on each loca­tion, head down to the indi­vid­ual sec­tions.

Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble I would LOVE to meet you at any one of these. If you’ll be in any of those areas on or around those dates, please sign up so I can keep you abreast of when the com­mu­ni­ty work­shop and meet up will be. Every­one who signs up AND shows up to their loca­tion gets a Heli­um in The Wild t‑shirt (while sup­plies last). 

If you know any­one I should meet or should invite to present at any of these, con­nect us up, yo.

Stoked!

Heli­um In The Wild

In the inter­est of mak­ing all this real­ly easy for you to keep track of, here are a few more things to think about.

At each loca­tion we’ll be run­ning some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Some will have the Here Be Drag­ons map­ping con­test, some will have pre­sen­ta­tions from experts, some will have a pan­el dis­cus­sion so you can learn from a vari­ety of peo­ple. All events will allow you to con­nect with locals who are into the same things you’re into as well as allow­ing you to build and strength­en local net­work connections.

Here Be Drag­ons map­ping con­test is an event with RAK 10701 LoRaWAN map­ping units. RAK is one of the spon­sors of the Heli­um In The Wild tour, and we’re psy­ched to see them sup­port­ing the com­mu­ni­ty! Dur­ing the con­test you’ll be com­pet­ing to see who can map a vari­ety of things, from most hotspots con­nect­ed to spe­cif­ic hotspots to most miles trav­eled. Tiny prizes will be giv­en to top per­form­ers, and at the end of the Heli­um In The Wild tour I’ll mail all the map­pers off to the var­i­ous win­ners. The Hotspot­ty team along with Dave Akers at Heli­um Ana­lyt­ics has gen­er­ous­ly agreed to help sup­port the back end of this so we can know who did what with a mapper. 🙂 

LOCATIONS & EVENTS

LISBON Activities

On Novem­ber 4th, at 11 AM, I’d love to meet you for cof­fee at Sel­va.

Pend­ing hard­ware arrival (it got stuck in tran­sit), on the 7th, in con­junc­tion with Daniel & Max at Hotspot­ty and spon­sored by RAK Wire­less, we’ll be run­ning the first ever Here Be Drag­ons event. You can buy an NFT for the event (NOT required, just a fun way to sup­port, all pro­ceeds will go to sup­port­ing a future Heli­um x Solana Hackathon).

If you’re com­ing, please reg­is­ter using the form above and show up. RAK Wire­less has spon­sored this event with 10 of their 10701 Wis­Block Field Testers which Daniel has set up to inte­grate with Hotspot­ty for scoring. 

After run­ning Here Be Drag­ons I’ll be explor­ing Solana Break­point and report­ing back on how mov­ing over to Solana will ben­e­fit Heli­um users in spe­cif­ic ways. If you’re in Lis­bon and have any­thing to do with IoT, Heli­um, and Solana, please reach out so we can connect!

I’ll attend the Proof of Phys­i­cal Work event and let you know more about the Hivemapper/Helium collab.

LONDON Activities

The Lon­don event is turn­ing into the head­line event of the tour. I’ve booked a pret­ty spe­cial place for us to meet, the Durham Street Audi­to­ri­um at the RSA House in Cen­tral London.

We’ve also got an adja­cent meet­ing space, the “Long Gallery” so you’ll have a place to min­gle and con­nect with oth­ers. We’ll have food there as well, so while I’ll ask ya not to come off a 1 week fast and clean out the refresh­ments, there’ll be some­thing to nib­ble on.

The event kicks off at 9:30 AM the morn­ing of the 11th, meet­ing in the Long Gallery to start the the Lon­don Here Be Drag­ons map­ping con­test using units sup­plied by RAK. You can buy an NFT for the event (NOT required, just a fun way to sup­port, all pro­ceeds will go to sup­port­ing a future Heli­um x Solana Hackathon).

After that, start­ing at 1 pm local time we’ll be hold­ing an series of talks focus­ing on run­ning an IoT busi­ness with Heli­um. We’ll have reps from the com­mu­ni­ty, Heli­um Foun­da­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ers, and even from out­side the Heli­um eco-sys­tem! The event runs 1–5 pm in cen­tral London. 

Event timeline:

0930 — 1000 Here Be Drag­ons Reg­is­tra­tion (option­al NFT for this is here)
1000 — 1300 Here Be Drag­ons map­ping con­test
1300 — 1315 What Hath Heli­um Done? — Nik Hawks/Gristle King
1315 — 1345 Build­ing a Busi­ness With Heli­um, Neil Skoggers/Trackpac,
1345 — 1400 Using Ana­lyt­ics to Dri­ve IoT Busi­ness Deci­sions, Dave Akers/HeliumAnalytics
1405 — 1435 Future of IoT Pan­el (Adri­an Clint/Helium Foun­da­tion, Skye Blackledge/RAK Wire­less, Adri­an Li Mow Ching/Linxdot)
1440 — 1500 Build­ing End to End Solu­tions, Rob Putt/Trackpac
1500 — 1600 How To Save The World With LoRaWAN, Bill Clee/Novacene
1600 — 1700 Min­gle as need­ed. Wall­flow­ers to depart. Extro­verts shall sustain.

If you’re com­ing to either (or both events), please reg­is­ter using the form above. RAK Wire­less has spon­sored this event with 10 of their 10701 Wis­Block Field Testers which Daniel at Hotspot­ty has set up to inte­grate with Hotspot­ty for scoring. 

PARIS Activities

Morn­ing meet­up at La Felici­ta, 10 AM, to con­nect with the local Heli­um crew (includ­ing local YouTu­ber SMOKLM).

We’ll spend the rest of that day and the next con­nect­ing with locals in Paris (and frankly, recov­er­ing from a blaster of a trip up ’til this point) and pre­pare for the final stage, Barcelona! We did have a trip down to Paul (aka Disk91 planned), but it ate up too much time; we’d be on the train for 8+ hours plus a 2 hour flight, all in the course of 24 hours. Far bet­ter to spend that time boots-on-the-ground in Paris!

BARCELONA Activities

The theme in Barcelona revolves around explor­ing how gov­ern­ments, specif­i­cal­ly cities, may use LoRaWAN and Heli­um. I’ll be attend­ing an expo called Smart Cities Barcelona to dive into how many munic­i­pal­i­ties are using the grow­ing flood of data to build and man­age bet­ter, smarter cities. 

On the evening of Novem­ber 16th we’ll be meet­ing with the IoT Barcelona Meet­up group at 6 pm. That group is run by Marc Pous, a Bale­na wiz­ard and our local con­nect. We’ll be at Itnig, which is a local stat­up hub; come join us if you’re around!

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