re: Which one of you made $10k last month mining Helium?

Nah, this stuff I've thrown together is nowhere near ready to be deployed in the wild. Just wires everywhere. For example, this is the current state of my ultrasonic distance node:



Top left of the breadboard is the ultrasonic sensor with its send/receive horns. Bottom center is the arduino pro mini. On the right is the battery pack and usb charge module. And floating above it all suspended by wires is the LoRa module with a plain wire antenna sticking out.

You're probably more likely to pay me to throw it away for you than to buy it from me. But the damned thing works. That sensor measures from 2-400cm (about 1 inch to 12+ feet), and in my testing accuracy is +/-1%. So the next step is to tidy up the wiring on a prototyping project board (rather than a breadboard as shown) so there aren't wires all over, then maybe have some PCBs printed up once I'm satisfied. Then of course I need to either find or draw and 3d print a weatherproof enclosure. You can use these range sensors to monitor fill levels of non-pressurized buckets/drums/hoppers of fluid/grains/whatever and things like that. You can also get different sensors with longer/shorter measurement ranges for different applications.


I just got my GPS modules in, and I think these will be really handy. I'll keep one in my truck, mostly to check Helium coverage wherever I go, but also it will be a really cheap lojack. Will also put one in my trailer and my SxS (probably will add battery monitoring). Then I might try to figure out how to add wireless charging and design a pet collar enclosure.

I also want to scatter weather stations all over the place for hyper-local weather reporting, door open/close sensors on all my gates, soil moisture sensors, etc. Pretty much anything that changes state, you can monitor. And it really doesn't take many data sources before you can build some really neat applications and automations.


And I'm really a novice with all this. If I can do it, so can you. All I really did was follow some guides that I found and use 99% other people's code. The hardest part is knowing what to google, and then figuring out how and what to modify to suit your use case. I will make some youtube videos about this stuff eventually, and if they're not too embarrassing maybe I will post them here.