Category Archives: Technology

Tips and test on technological product and components. Operating system, networks, hardware, security…
Astuces et tests autour de produits et composants technologiques, systèmes, réseaux, hardware, sécurité …

Helium Kerlink Miner iFemToCell

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Kerlink Helium Miner iFemToCell

Kerlink is a LoRaWan hardware player since the first ages of this technology. This French company has equipped most of the operator’s network and is used to propose high quality industrial products.

The iFemToCell is not a new product. It exists since a couple of years and I already tested the IFemToCell 4 years ago. Recently the company has created a Helium edition we are going to review in this blog post.

This is an interesting device as it is a kind of hybrid between a light miner and a full miner. Even if the Kerlink platform is powerful, it is far away the power of a raspberry Pi and certain operations like consensus group can’t be performed. As this is now delegated to Validator, this difference have no impact on rewards. In another hand, this device is consuming less power and it is possible to power it with sun more easily. This is quite interesting.

Let see what is this device and what is specific during its deployment.

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Migrate any LoRaWAN gateway to helium network as a Data-Only hotspot

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Migrating existing LoRaWAN network to Helium or joining Helium for new deployment is accessing to the world largest LoRaWAN network and enable your devices to be deployed in the large covered zone. By doing this you extends the community network and as a counter part getting benefit on future data transfer and immediately get an access to the low cost ecosystem (data transfer, network server, high redundancy network…)

In a previous post I explained how to configure a RAK Wisgate as a Helium Data-Only hotspot. In a such situation your LoRaWAN gateway becomes a hotspot relaying the Helium traffic and getting some little rewards for the data transfer. The more important is to extend the coverage. This way of doing is good but I’ve got some issues on the field: The data transfer from the hotspot to the blockchain (even if just the state channels) is high and the software, currently in alpha, is not totally stable. When deploying a gateway is isolated area to provide new coverage, honestly, these two issues are blocking points.

The second important consideration is the existing gateways, already deployed on the field: they are currently used for private networks. They have been deployed some years ago and are not in the compatibility list of Helium hardware. Even if they are, deploying a new software on them, remotely can be a problem.

For these different reasons, I’ve been investigating a different approach by creating centrally hosted hotspots connected to different LoRaWAN gateways through the legacy Semtech protocol. This is what we are going to detail on this blog-post.

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First IoT frame sent to space with Kineis devkit

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The Kineis IoT solution is an IoT network based on satellite’s communications. Thank to it, a device can communicate from any point of Earth with a single technology. Kineis is using an existing fleet of Argos satellites launched during the last 40 years and is already commercially available. This fleet will grow fast in the next two years to offer a communication window up to 4 times per hour.

In this blog post, I’m going to detail my first experience with Kineis for sending frames through the satellites of the fleet. I’ve been using a KIM Arduino Devkit. The on-boarding is quite fast, let’s see this!

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Helium Data-Only hotspot with RAK WisGate Edge Prime

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RAK7240

It’s time to extend the Helium network out of the city centers ! Now as most of the Helium Pioneers have stacked a lot of HNT, it is time to reinvest a part of it to grow the attractivity of the network and improve the future value of the token as a consequence. At least it is my point of view on what every Helium participant should start doing. Each hostpot revenue is currently sufficiently high to participate to network extension with Data-Only equipment.

Data Only Hotspot are LongFi (LoRaWan) gateways not doing mining, they are just relaying data and, as a consequence, only earn token for packet transfer. If the network use becomes high, this could be an interesting revenue.

Data Only Hotspot target 2 different use-cases:

  • Low density area, they are the zone where you don’t have a big chance to have many other hotspot around and full hotspot price won’t make it interesting regarding the low chance to get PoC reward. Basically, they are good to deploy in the countryside, mountains … to extend coverage but not expecting high revenue. This is important to do to enable used-cases based on a large coverage for the network.
  • Professional networks. This is the main, short term, interest of Helium Data Only Hotspot. Service providers using LoRaWan are mostly relying on private networks with owned equipment’s. These equipment can be migrated or deployed on the Helium network with Data-Only Hotspot without risk of market shortage, larger reliability and lower cost and lower bandwidth and power consumption than full miners. Service providers get different advantages for doing this: get benefit of the existing Helium coverage worldwide (as primary solution or as a redundancy) and get some income for transferring other LoRaWan communication.

For my first experimentation with Helium Data Only Hotspot, I made the choice of RAK Wisgate Edge Prime because this device is reasonable price for high end experience. It is outdoor, with LTE, supporting PoE under $400. This is really fitting well with the second use-case : professional deployment I noticed above. I will later review the Dragino lower cost gateway for addressing the first use-case.

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Storj – a blockchain for storing data

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Storj is a blockchain in competition with cloud providers like Amazon to offer a decentralized data storage managed over a blockchain. This is the kind of project I like as they are running blockchain to offer tangible services in the real world and competing with existing business in a new way.

I previously did some experimentation with Sia proposing the same thing but I’ve been really disappointed by the way it works. I’ll detail it later in the blog post. So I decide to create a Storj node to offer storage and also try using Storj to store some of my data.

Storj have an advantage compared to cloud provider, the warranty of a high level of protection of your personal data. The data is spread over multiple nodes and strongly encrypted. In term of price, I’ll detail it also later in the blog post.

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The Sensecap Helium miner

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Sensecap is one of the Helium miner official hardware. This one has been made in collaboration with Seeed a big hardware maker and provider.

The production and distribution has started on July 2021 and that solution is really promising to help solving the shortage issues currently seen in the Helium market. As a reminder, Helium growth has been from 15.000 hotspots to 100,000 hotspot in less than 8 months. In a period of global shortage in semi-conductor market it is quite challenging for the hardware provider and the current estimates are about 200,000 – 400,000 back orders.

Sensecap coming batch of 10,000 and more units are really welcome, with the promise of selling produced only devices instead of pre-orders. It sounds like a good choice now days.

So let’s review the technical part of the Sensecap miner.

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Filter X-Forwarded-For Apache

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The XFF HTTP field can be used to obtain the remote IP when a http server is located behind a reverse proxy. If the remote proxy does not clean the XFF field you can’t trust it. The worst is that this field can be used for injecting code in your website.

I’ve been a such issue in a security plugging logging and not filtering the remote IP field. As this one came from XFF, it was possible to inject javascript into the database remotely and execute that JS when displaying the dashboard of the “security” pluggin.

One of the option to solve this is to clean the XFF field (or reject the request when the XFF is not clean). This can be done with a simple configuration in the http config file (or htaccess)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-For} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-For} !^[0123456789.\ ,]{7,36}$
RewriteRule ^ - [L,R=404]

Here, empty XFF and XFF container anything else than numbers and some other char, lower than 7 char and higher the 36 chars will be rejected with a 404 as Last operation.

Satellite’s IoT is now ready for use with Kineis

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Kineis nano-sat Photo credit Kinéis et Héméria

Even if you think it is the first time you heard about Kineis, you are basically wrong in some ways ! This company is a recent “Startup”, existing since June 2019 but for real, they are managing an IoT offer based on top the famous and quite experienced Argos system, started in 1978 and now operating more the 22.000 devices running application like animal tracking, ocean safety and many scientific programs.
The service is running over the 8 satellites currently in orbit, making Kineis the most advanced satellite IoT solution commercially available as of today.

Thanks to the polar orbit of the satellites, the whole earth is covered, no white zone, no blind spots from pole to pole, ocean to desert, device are communicating from everywhere, autonomously.

This blog post is the first of a series made with the help of Kineis to introduce you the technology and my experience with it. As usual, there is no sponsoring for these blog posts but a close work with Kineis as the offer is only open to business companies currently.

Companies like Exotic Systems, Arribada or Advanced Tracking, have already started to make products using Kineis network for asset tracking applications mainly.

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