What’s Helium?

Helium is a decentralized network company founded in late 2012 that aims to provide low-powered network to anyone and everyone, anywhere, for an extremely low cost. The network is hosted by hundreds of thousands of individual users who can buy “miners”, or hosting stations, and get paid in $HNT to host the network for others to use.

Having quite a lot of entrepreneurial traits myself, I decided to pursue helium mining/hosting on a larger scale and with a good friend of mine, started developing robust solar-powered stationst that could host Helium from hard-to-get-to places.

Starting an off-grid setup

After seeing another mining setup on a hill near my house (shown below), my friend and I became instantly inspired and set out to build a station on our own. Not knowing how it worked, however, caused us to reverse engineer the station from zero.

Reverse Engineering and Findings

Essentially, looking at our pictures to identify what was on the station, we came up with a possible configuration that might look like the following:

Station Iteration A

At first, we set out to directly duplicate the station’s design that we found on the hill previously. However, after deploying the station to the hill, some issues arose pretty quickly:

• Electronics were unable to be serviced or accessed

• The station was not easy to transport or install

• Routing wires through the skinny mast were a challenge

Learning from failures: Iterating into Revision B

To avoid as many shortcomings as possible, I banked on my 3D CAD knowledge to design a revised version two setup! I focused on moving the only bit of electronics that genuinely needed servicing, the cell-enabled router, to a separate electronics compartment stored above ground.

In this model, the following changes took place:

• The electronics bay was raised up way higher (although still buried) to reduce the hole size for installation

• The router was moved into a second auxilary box above ground that would allow for easy network servicing, like replacing a SIM card

• The antenna used a custom 3D printed mount with a shorter antenna to reduce transport hassles.

Ultimately while this design worked well, common issues like poor servicability and inconvenience with installation of the stations drove a third, drastically revised station.

Scaling deployment with Revision C

After talking with other off-gridders in the community, I settled for a much more transportable design. The station would be set up on a tripod, anchored to the ground, and have no buried electronics. It would be smaller, lighter, and easier to transport in vehicles.

After two deployments of Version C, many of the previous problems were solved. There was now no need to dig any holes for electronics, servicing was easier, and deployment was less of a hassle.

While Version C worked extremely well for it’s design goals, I played with the idea of reducing the station size even more, leading to revision D

Revision D: The “Stance” Machine

You might be more familiar with this stance machine:

With some inspiration from a glorified lawnmower I decided to produce my last few stations in this configuration:

These have been by far the easiest stations to deploy. They fit in the back of most SUVs and are simply required to be plopped down, that’s it! I currently have four of these stations deployed throughout various hills and all have run for months without the need for maintenance to this point.

Takeaways and Lessons

• Fail hard and fail fast. Every good design must come from many bad designs.

• Simplicity is king; extra components, size, and parts cause inconvenience and exessive failure.