How To Use Hotspotty To Crush

Hotspot­ty start­ed as a way for Daniel Andrade (@spillere on Dis­cord) to man­age the grow­ing fleet of Heli­um Hotspots he was rolling out togeth­er with Maxime Goossens and Alex­is Argent.

In the begin­ning we had a tiny script that would send our dai­ly rewards to a Telegram group. 

It’s, uh, grown from that. 🙂

Let’s start with a lit­tle back­ground on the Hotspot­ty team. Daniel is a Brazil­ian born itin­er­ant con­sul­tant trained as an elec­tri­cal engi­neer with an inter­est in web design & cod­ing. He has con­tributed heav­i­ly to the Heli­um community. 

Maxime is their engi­neer­ing wiz­ard, com­bin­ing a dri­ve to solve com­plex prob­lems with an abil­i­ty to show you, very quick­ly, the use­ful parts of the data.

Alex­is has a strong inter­est in open source com­mu­ni­ca­tions and blockchain tech­nol­o­gy. He’s found­ed 2 com­pa­nies in VoIP and Wire­less distribution. 

They recent­ly walked me through the lat­est incar­na­tion of Hotspot­ty in the accom­pa­ny­ing video (vid link at the bottom).

What is Hotspotty, and how can you use it to help you within the Helium ecosystem? 

Hotspot­ty is designed to be an all-encom­pass­ing tool for Heli­um users, from own­ers of sin­gle hotspots out to groups run­ning a fleet of thou­sands. What does all-encompassing…encompass? Let’s go through the high points. 

Understand the Network

First, Hotspot­ty helps you visu­al­ize the com­plex math, equa­tions, and rules that gov­ern the growth of a healthy Heli­um net­work. If you’ve ever been con­found­ed try­ing to wrap your head around HIP 17 with its density target, or number of siblings, or density max rules, Hotspot­ty makes the whole sim­ple to under­stand from the per­spec­tive of any hotspot on the planet.

Now you can see what the edge of any hex looks like (NOT a straight line), and also very quick­ly see where the “prob­lem” hex­es are so you can work to clear them. If you want to dive a bit deep­er into HIP 17, I’ve got a post writ­ten up on it over here.

Collaborate with your team

Now, let’s say you work with oth­er peo­ple to man­age your Net­work. You might have Installers, or Hosts, or a Fleet Man­ag­er, or even a Region Man­ag­er. You can sep­a­rate out all those roles into Con­tacts or Mem­bers, assign them labels, and give them appro­pri­ate access. 

Con­tacts may not be inter­nal mem­bers; they could be an installer you just want to use occa­sion­al­ly, or a host who does­n’t need to see your whole net­work but does need to get paid out month­ly (or how­ev­er you do it, this is NOT tax advice!)

Hotspot­ty allows you to also have Work­space Mem­bers who DO get access to the inside track. You can add these to your Mem­bers list, invite ’em in, and let them col­lab­o­rate with you.

Optimize your deployment

Ok, so once you’ve start­ed build­ing your team, how do you opti­mize your Heli­um Net­work deploy­ments? By div­ing into the Map sec­tion of the Hotspot­ty app and tak­ing a look at the var­i­ous tools avail­able. As of Sep 18th, 2021, most of the tools focus on *avoid­ing* bad places rather than find­ing the best places, but that sec­ond part is com­ing, and soon.

What is a “bad” place in the land of Heli­um? I’d define it gen­er­al­ly in three ways:

• Den­si­ty — Local and Regional
• Topog­ra­phy — Sig­nals blocked by earth
• Vol­ume — Enough Hotspots to reli­ably con­nect & ini­ti­ate the earn­ing sequence

I’ve talked a bunch about opti­miz­ing your hotspot place­ment (see my Rough Guide for a deep dive), but it can be com­pli­cat­ed to run all the num­bers hotspot by hotspot.

See­ing a “bad” place on Hotspot­ty is as easy as open­ing the app, click­ing on the Map sec­tion, then click­ing on the Hex­es tab, and if you want to see spe­cif­ic res­o­lu­tions, click­ing on the Fil­ter button.

There’s anoth­er cool fea­ture you can use just for quick checks, and that’s see­ing where hotspots are too close togeth­er to have a *valid* wit­ness (the “300 meter” rule.) Here’s what it looks like when you turn on the lay­er in the set­tings cog, at the top right.

See all those line between hotspots? Every one of those indi­cates that those hotspots are too close to each oth­er to be a valid wit­ness. Neat, eh?

Collaborate with the Helium community

Now comes one of the coolest parts of Hotspot­ty, though it’ll take all of us work­ing togeth­er to make use­ful: Col­lab­o­ra­tion. Of course, you can col­lab­o­rate with your inter­nal team, and that’s cool, but as Max from Hotspot­ty says after look­ing through reams of data: 

What we dis­cov­ered is actu­al­ly quite inter­est­ing; most of the opti­miza­tion is beyond your con­trol.  Your earn­ings are defined by your environment.

-Max @ Hotspotty

Managing the Environment — Contacting Hotspot Owners

How do you man­age your envi­ron­ment? By talk­ing to oth­er peo­ple! Hotspot­ty allows you to do this in a rea­son­ably anony­mous way. You can send a mes­sage to any hotspot, and if that hotspot own­er ever looks at Hotspot­ty, they’ll see some­one has mes­saged them. They can choose to ignore it, or they can “claim” the wal­let asso­ci­at­ed the hotspot the received the mes­sage and start a con­ver­sa­tion with you.

What does it look like? Let’s walk through the 4 step process.

Step 1: Iden­ti­fy the prob­lem. In this case, I fil­tered Amer­i­ca’s Finest City (San Diego) by res 7’s, then just ran­dom­ly select­ed one to see if there was an easy fix. I mean, Hotspot­ty is telling me we only have to move 1 of ’em!

Step 2: Dig in and look for easy wins. In this case, there’s a hotspot that right on the edge of the res 7 AND is also super-crowd­ing anoth­er hotspot. Easy fix!

Step 3: Iden­ti­fy the exact Hotspot.

Step 4: Ini­ti­ate con­tact. Be cool, offer help. Do NOT be a jack­wag­on! Only show­ing them how THEY can move to ben­e­fit YOU is NOT help­ing the community. 🙂 

Managing the environment: Spawning a Discord Channel

Anoth­er rad way to invite your local crew to par­tic­i­pate is by “spawn­ing” a Dis­cord chan­nel based on a spe­cif­ic hex. You choose your prob­lem hex, spawn the Dis­cord (which will open up a new chan­nel in the Hotspot­ty Dis­cord), then ral­ly folks into it. I’ve done the “ral­ly” side by work­ing in the much larg­er region­al chan­nels over on the Heli­um offi­cial dis­cord and say­ing, “Hey, if you’re in [San Diego] and want to improve our reward scale, jump on into the dis­cus­sion and let’s crank up earn­ings togeth­er, [here]!”

As an exam­ple, here’s the San Diego res 4 Dis­cord channel. 

Manage payouts

Final­ly, you can man­age pay­outs. The Hotspot­ty v1 is still alive and well for this. On v2 (which is what I’ve cov­ered in this post) as of today, you can just get the cor­rect num­bers for what you need to pay out, but can’t automag­i­cal­ly make it so your wal­let pays anoth­er wal­let on some cer­tain date/time, but that’s coming.

Ready to dive in? Cruise over to Hotspot­ty and sign up to get start­ed. Enjoy, and let’s make the Heli­um Net­work rad­i­cal together!

The full inter­view is over on the Toobz, or you can watch it right here.

Until next time, rock on!

If you’re look­ing for work in the Heli­um ecosys­tem, please check out this rad project I’m a part of called Heli­um Jobs. You can post and find jobs there, help sup­port the ecosys­tem by mak­ing it eas­i­er to con­nect pro­fes­sion­al­ly, and let the world know that YOU exist and want to help con­tribute with­in the Net­work. Rock on!