Gristle King - A Guide to DePIN

Tag: helium

  • Reports from the Field — Helium In The Wild, Hackathon Train

    Reports from the Field — Helium In The Wild, Hackathon Train

    —

    by

    Nik
    in , ,

    “The job right now isn’t to make IoT easy. It’s to make it work”.  As I look across the Heli­um ecosys­tem in ear­ly Decem­ber of 2022, I’m start­ing to see the emer­gence of work­ing busi­ness­es built on Heli­um. Baxus may be the most recent exam­ple; a com­pa­ny track­ing all the con­di­tions of items as they move…

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

    Reports From The Field: Helium In The Wild — Lisbon

    —

    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…

  • Helium In The Wild — Start Your Engines!

    Helium In The Wild — Start Your Engines!

    —

    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…

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

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

    —

    by

    Nik
    in , ,

    “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…

  • Helium Analytics: Data, Truth, and the Results

    Helium Analytics: Data, Truth, and the Results

    —

    by

    Nik
    in ,

    Heli­um is a com­plex sys­tem. If you don’t under­stand it, that com­plex­i­ty can be REALLY frustrating.  There are radio fre­quen­cy con­cepts, Hotspot den­si­ty rules, dif­fer­ent anten­nas, cables, split­ters, and a con­stant­ly chang­ing Net­work. Those all com­bine to make an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly com­plex sys­tem. In any com­plex sys­tem, the big oppor­tu­ni­ty is to look for big pat­terns…

  • How To Troubleshoot Your Helium Hotspot

    —

    by

    Nik
    in

    Heli­um is a rapid­ly grow­ing and wild ecosys­tem. Like any oth­er new ecosys­tem, things are con­stant­ly chang­ing, and the main sources of infor­ma­tion most new users rely on (Explor­er and the Heli­um app) can be up 48 hours behind.  That means when you check your Hotspot via Explor­er on Tues­day, you could be look­ing at…

  • The Helium CLI Wallet — Not For The Faint Of Heart

    —

    by

    Nik
    in ,

    There’s almost no good rea­son to use the CLI (Com­mand Line Inter­face) wal­let for a nor­mal per­son, but…not every­one who gets into Heli­um is nor­mal. If, like me, you’re faced with hav­ing to use it, this series of instruc­tions might help.  This is NOT writ­ten for experts who know what they’re doing; they’ll laugh at this.…

  • What Does PoCv11 Mean For Me?

    —

    by

    Nik
    in

    Short ver­sion: Use a low gain anten­na, report your loca­tion and anten­na gain accu­rate­ly. If you’re in the US, this isn’t a big deal, as our radios pump out enough pow­er to get excel­lent range even with a low gain anten­na. If you’re in a region (UK, EU, etc) where your radio out­put is low,…

  • What Does A Good Hotspot Cluster Look Like?

    —

    by

    Nik
    in

    40–60 Hotspots, all about 1,500m away from any oth­er, with any one of ’em hav­ing clear line of sight to at least 30 others.  Wait, you want more, and you want to know how I came up with that (with help)? Start by read­ing my post on PoC cycles, oth­er­wise you’ll be miss­ing some key…

  • Helium Deployed: The Network In Action

    —

    by

    Nik
    in ,

    Our pilot project is com­plete, and boy have we learned a ton from this one! While many are still focus­ing on earn­ing HNT for Heli­um Hotspot deploy­ments, the obvi­ous move for those of us inter­est­ed in longevi­ty is actu­al­ly USING the Network. Over the course of a week, sup­port­ed by Tom­my and Ryan at Lon­es­tar…