Tuesday 3 May 2022

Helium Mappers

Using a Lilygo TTGO T-Beam to run Helium Mappers software. 100mW on the 868MHz band.

The code is by Max-Plastix

What is Helium ? Seen a load of small vertical antennas going up on nearby houses? Wondering why the price of good coax cable just rocketed? All the important things you need to know are:

  1. Paradigm Shift
  2. Decentralised
  3. Blockchain

OLED display comes with the unit but needs soldering on (4 pins)

A professional car installation, perfectly balanced on my phone holder

There's a holder for a 18650 cell but it runs on a USB power bank and no cell

Mapping the A590. This area was previously uncharted territory. Some transmissions are getting across Morecambe Bay from inside the car (see top right, receiving hotspot is at Heysham)

Some good locations in Barrow, getting across The Bay




 

2 comments:

Nick B. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Nick B. said...

This looked like an interesting project so I picked up the T-Beam from Amazon UK, then followed the Max-Plastic notes, installed Visual Studio Code and PlatformIO.
There has been an update to 1.7.7 which is now running on mine.
I figured out that you needed to register with Helium, then take the survey to get the 10,000 credits. Then add some functions and integrations to Console so my tracks appear on Mappers and Cargo.
Similar in this part of the UK, there are a few hotspots but no things and quite a lot of unmapped territory. The only downside is the price of petrol!