I have been running several IoT nodes on solar charged Lithium cells (using the TP4056 charger) for years, but in cases where more than a few 100 mA is needed, this ‘dumb’ charging did not perform well. So i decided
As described earlier, i designed and installed 2 ultrasonic distance sensors based on an ESP32 with a LoRa radio module. They are within reach of my LoRaWAN gateway, and connected to The Things Network. I started my experiments in March/April
Large parts of the Helium LoRaWAN network consists of hotspots spoofing their location and earning HNT via Proof-of-Coverage while actually not providing any real world coverage for genuine data traffic. This is well known, Helium/NOVA claims to be fixing it
Out of the 100s of Helium hotspots shown in Hong Kong on Helium Explorer, i have so far been able to confirm 20 real ones, by going around the city with a mapping device (see part 1 for details). Today
As far as i can tell, the Dragino LPS8 is very poorly designed for heat dissipation; with the ambient air at around 25 degrees Celsius the device overheats and reboots frequently. I have added a cooling fan to the front
I thought it would be a good experiment to install a few sensors in my neighborhood monitoring the water level in several streams. As i live near the sea, i expect them to show the tide coming in, and also
While the denylist has grow to 41,544 known fake hotspots in its latest version of 22 Feb 2022, the Helium location spoofing scam continues. After the previous 100 fake hotspots moved their location from Lantau island to the Philippines early
Looking for real Helium hotspots in Hong Kong, i started to wonder how much real data traffic the Helium network is seeing around the world. With a simple script accessing the Helium blockchain API i found out that out of
The Helium Explorer is mainly a tool for HNT miners, due to widespread location spoofing it does not show real network coverage (see previous posts and denylist). So in order to understand the real network coverage, i built a GPS
As shown before, much of the blockchain-powered Helium LoRaWAN network is fake, especially in Hong Kong. Scammers claim their hotspots are installed in these locations to earn HNT while in reality they are probably somewhere in a garage, not providing