Build your Helium Data-Only Hotspot with balena

Discussions
1

Please use the thread below to discuss the related blog post:

2

Great article thanks however I’m confused about what module to get for AU915 (New Zealand).

Your article links to the EU868 USB but there are three other variants i.e. SPI x2 and the USB US915.

The Seeed Studio description is the same for all four so any guidance is much appreciated :pray:

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4

Thank you for your message @philT

Actually it looks like the Seeed WM1302 is not available as SPI AS915 region. My recommendation is to get the RAK wireless 2287 (SX1302) from here.

BTW i haven’t tested the USB version, so i strongly recommend the SPI version.

5

Hi @mpous

Long time being apart from this side, I took some time to update on my repo to latest gateaway-rs now that Helium has moved to Solana, it’s working with minimum mods

see changes on my repo rony-vargas/helium-data-hotspot (github.com)
Not elegant since is pretty much harcoding the gateway-rs version and other stuff, but working…
:smile:

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6

@ronyvargas thank you for sharing!

from the changes i see it should work. BTW why you didn’t make this line to work with the Dockerfile variables?

Happy to accept your PR with these changes!

7

I don’t fully understand what to do with the @ronyvargas fork of this project.
It seems to be almost a full copy/paste of the original, including the instructions that reference ‘Summer 2021’ and instructions to
‘git clone GitHub - mpous/helium-data-hotspot’
but it has updated gateway-rs.

If I just (August 2023) deployed a node using the image currently in Balena Cloud, what modifications do I need to make so it will work with the current Helium infrastructure (running on Solana, etc.)?

@mpous - any chance we can get the version of this package on Balena Cloud updated?

Thanks!!

8

Hello @CablingOptional first of all welcome to the balena community.

I haven’t tried personally but it might work without any problem. The new gateway-rs project run on Solana successfully. Did you try and get any issue?

9

I was able to install Balena CLI on my Debian VM, download the latest 1.1.1 version of gateway-rs and do a ‘balena push helium-data-hotspot’, and get the latest version of gateway-rs pushed to my device:

/opt/gatewayrs# ./helium_gateway --version
helium_gateway 1.1.1

I can even find my hotspot’s name and address, and do the ‘helium_gateway add’ command (as long as I convert my wallet’s Solana address to an HNT address using this tool:

/opt/gatewayrs# ./helium_gateway add --owner [Solana_Wallet_Address_Converted_to_HNT_Address] --payer [Solana_Wallet_Address_Converted_to_HNT_Address] --mode dataonly
{
  "address": "[hidden]",
  "fee": 65000,
  "mode": "dataonly",
  "owner": "[hidden]",
  "payer": "[hidden]",
  "staking fee": 1000000,
  "txn": "[Very_Long_String]"
}
root@77bda06c1f14:/opt/gatewayrs#

Where I get stuck is with my CLI wallet, on a different Linux system.
I try the command ‘./helium-wallet hotspots add YOUR_TXN’, where YOUR_TXN is quite a long string obtained from the hotspot itself after running the add command’.

./helium-wallet --version
helium-wallet 2.0.0-rc.3

./helium-wallet hotspots add --subdao iot --mode data-only --commit [very long string]
Wallet Password: [hidden]
{
  "result": "ok",
  "txid": "2Fty2cbN6EN1Aeew1WfoXeoR4ZtEcCawYPiqppfV3QANGd6AzsE37b6VXCyKW2efN39ewAqoaUMW32v8xqB7Z4se"
}
Error: Account not found

Any ideas what I need to do differently?

10

@CablingOptional i think this issue needs to be asked to the Helium team on Discord. Did you try there?

Happy to help you from there!

11

Hello @CablingOptional did you fix the issue? Let me know if you asked on discord!

12

Hello -

Yep, I asked on Discord, and the answer was that it’s not yet possible to assert a data-only hotspot - since the move to Solana - but that this ability will be restored very soon.

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13

Thanks for sharing this. Keep us updated when this is possible. In the meantime i will modify the documentation!

14

Sorry for late response guys, I’ve been full on a project and this was left behind.
My data hotspot is still working, I believe the reason is because it was asserted before the cutover, I did convert the HNT wallet to SOL and I receive rewards for data transfer.
The fork was actually a work-in-progress at the time @CablingOptional that I didn’t finish, but still wanted to share to community that updating the gateway-rs is pretty much the only change needed.
thanks @mpous to keep things running…

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