Tag Archives: mining

COTX-X3 helium miner review

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After reviewing different Helium miner like RAK, Sensecap, Kerlink, Nebra… now comes the Cotx-X3 miner. This miner has a long story and a bad reputation, due to something not really clean the maker did with the first units.

This is not related to the hardware quality and I’ve been happy to buy some of them for reviewing it. This miner is a full miner, based on a standard design using a Raspberry Pi 4. It has the particularity of having a front screen and an audio jack ! Don’t laughs, the reason is simple, this device has a different usage before becoming an helium miner.

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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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Nebra Helium miner review

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Nebra indoor miner customer box

After reviewing the Rak Wireless miner in a previous blog post, after receiving my own Nebra miner, I’ll give a review of it.

The Nebra miner is one of the different Helium miner machine. It is at first a LongFi (LoRaWan) gateway. It includes a software to run it over a blockchain to create a global IoT network. you can get more details on what is helium in the linked blog post.

This review is on a Nebra batch #1, it is possible that some of the given information will not be valid in a couple of weeks when the batch #2, #3 … will be delivered. No need to precise it but this is an end-user review. I’ve ordered and paid my miner. I’ve no link with Nebra.

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My little Bitcoin investment & mining experience

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I do not count the time I looked at Bitcoin in the past since about 2011-2012. Every time I started thinking about mining there was an investment to do (like GPU, then ASIC) and I never trust enough this money to make this investment. So as a consequence I never jump into this techno by the past, more than to understand how it works and learn.

Now Bitcoin in reaching some unexpected peaks ( > 15,000€ ) and it really looks like a bubble everyone is talking about, so as a mad man, I through it was the perfect time to start playing with this money. Trust me, as a guy who started investing in Internet technologies in 2001, you may never follow me on such decision !

Starting playing with this was an interesting learning opportunity, so this post will relate this experience and the different things I found in the bitcoin ecosystem.

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