Traditional update of my teaching support on IoT. This year I’ve addressed my speak to larger and different audiences. As a consequence I publish a totally renewed slide-deck with 203 slides. I’ve improved the IoT business model description, use-cases and technology area. I also detailed the platform side of the IoT solutions.
Feel free to reuse this content for your own conference and speak. I’m available for conference, talk … let me know.
The full PDF is available on the following link.
Helium is a crowdsourced-crypto-blockchain-Iot network working with LoRaWan. With all these trendy name, for sure they had the key elements to raise a large amount of money. That’s great for the development of this technology.
I’ve decided to write about this IoT network after an interesting talk given at the Zurich IoT meetup today (thank you CoVID-19 for making us the opportunity to reach such event, today online, bad things can get positive sometime).
Helium is a crowdsourced network. It means, like for TheThingsNetwork or Amazon Sidewalk, the infrastructure, at least the gateways part (antennas) are provided by anybody, basically you and me. That way the network deployment costs are really limited and the network have no boundaries.
Compared to TTN, Helium network is “crypto-blockchained” basically, the gateway owner are mining different challenges like registering some network change, proving the location of a gateway, cryptocurrency transactions… For this work, for maintaining the network architecture and relaying the messages, the gateway’s owner are earning HNT (Helium Network Tokens) ($2.24 each today).
Compared to TTN where you make it running for free, just because you are convinced about the sharing economy, Helium base its business model on a promise of getting some money back from your investment the gateways (+energy, communications…).
Helium is an IoT network, a LPWAN for being more precise. It relies on LoRaWan standard protocol & gateways. You need to add an Helium miner software on a backend system to make it running.
So they are looking to Uber-ize the telecom domain, at least this is what they are expecting.
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Yes, I’ve got one of these LoRaWan light saber I was looking for, since a while! For this I really thank you Wifx who helped me to get one. I know this is really unusual for them to work with blogger, so thank you for your trust. So honestly, even if I’ve been sponsored to get the device, I’m really happy to make that gateway test. As I said this gateway is one of my favorite since a while. The reason are a really compact outdoor design. It makes the difference 😉
I did not made a test previously because this have a cost, about 500€, (549CHF) this not much expensive but a bit high regrading my non-profit activity on TheThingsNetwork local deployment.
Now, I’m done telling you my life, we can see what this gateway is proposing !
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For the French audience, I’ve just published a Mooc on Sigfox technology with a practical based on the Arduino MKRFox1200 board. You can watch it for free on Youtube Disk91 Sigfox Mooc. There are 16 short episodes, published every day at 6:15pm french time.
IoT decoded #7, the monthly LPWAn podcast analyzing the IoT news and trends. Register to podcast : looking for feed subscription on bottom right of this web page or search for IoT Decoded on Apple Podcast application.
This month the podcast is addressing news on:
The musical theme is Cascade by Kubbi (CC)
Pandemic prevention and management is an interesting territory for IoT. I’ve seen different projects and solutions made in emergency to help during the Covid-19 crisis like some connected button distributed in hospitals to get assistance for going to toilets. That’s an interesting use case for IoT where you can deploy quickly a solution (20K have been produced in this example) and make it working in an existing environment (an hospital) with no integration complexity with network or other existing infrastructures.
My favorite example is the Us health Weather Map reporting the human temperature sensor information across the USA. I love this use-case because it works on prevention: detecting the rise of the pandemic, show its movement and scale. The current problem is that these data comes from high-end thermometers, using Bluetooth and the number of device is limited. The other problem are the personal information attached to these device.
This is where LPWAN and Sigfox in particular can be used to propose a innovative solution I’m going to detail a bit.
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I really love Reece Innovation Solar powered pod product developed by my friend Jose Marcelino. They’ve made a agricultural / industrial autonomous solar powered LoRaWan gateway for a really competitive price. With much more money to extend TheThingsNetwork in my city I would have used a such solution. But as this is just a hobby for me, I’m looking for really low cost solution, something under 500€ per gateway.
My main issue to extend the network is not really to find roof but to find some where I can pass an Ethernet cable and provide the power from it. I have some place where I could deploy new gateway in conduction to be cable-less. The network is not the main issue as most of the time a WiFi network is accessible. Powering is a larger problem to solve. Advantages of outdoor gateway: you have sun available. So, as Reece Innovation did, I decided to make my solar gateway, the main differences are: my will have no LTE communication capability (only WiFi) and it have to cost as less as possible.
Let see what I’ve done
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Today was the first day of The Things Conference (TTC) 2020 in Amsterdam. TTC is the yearly event organized by The Things Network initiative. Years after years this event is becoming THE world LoRaWan event. The Things Network let the floor to The Things Industry, all the LoRaWan industrial ecosystem is coming to Amsterdam to discuss about the future of this LPWAn technology. The community spirit is still here, strong and awesome: I had plenty of discussions with many tech & business guy I never met before ; I’ve learned a lot of thing through the high quality conferences. Two days of conference will be too short for meeting people I’ve listed and follow the conference track.
So let’s talk a bit about the content of this first days and the direction The Things Industry is giving to LoRaWan ecosystem. Because, trust me or not, even if the LoRaWan alliance is full of big telecom companies, it really seems that, this small group of 20 awesome people from TTN are taking the lead.
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