Good morning.
As you may be aware my love affair with Helium is well and truly over. I really don't follow the HIPs (Helium Improvement Proposals.)I hardly check with the still awful wallet how many tokens I have earnt and only once collected my staking reward of 11 cents! So when I heard about a new project using Helium miners I thought I would take a look.
It is called Defli.
Now as many Helium miners are fed up with the project, there have been a few different projects that let you repurpose your miner. There was
https://www.i05.co/
I think this is no longer running.
io5-using-helium-hotspots-is-a-bit-fishy
https://crankk.io/
Crankk's goal is to build and operate a LoRaWAN network providing coverage for IoT devices, such as smart meters, GPS trackers, etc.
https://piphi.network/
The PiPHi Network is a global distributed data collection platform.
None of these progects appealed to me but the one that did was this one https://defli.network/ so I repurposed one of my sensecaps to the defli network. (When I say I, I mean David. He did the tech bit, i just did the research!) Now I am excitedly looking at planes!
We are using an old sensecap with a new usb sdr (software defined radio) this was not expensive and it was easy to buy, so it can just plug in to the raspberry pi board, a new sd card (You can overwrite the Helium one, but if you keep it you could always go back to Helium) the cables and antennas are from our Helium miner so the costs have been minimal. We did buy a license at a discount so that was only $50. Defli have also set a limit on the number of ground stations that they will onboard every month.
We are really early with this project and joined when there were less than 100 wallets, so hopefully the early birrd will catch the worm!
It is not quite as plug in and play as Helium was (although there were some teething issues with that) but there are some helpful videos and written steps to follow from the community. The defli discord site was also very helpful (so David tells me).
HOW DID I DO IT?
What I did was
1 Go to the defli site and click on host and pay the license fee, I paid with COINBASE and used LTC, there were other options. Save your UUID.
2 Then I went to defli-wallet.com and created a wallet and registered (the email used must match with the email used to buy the license) You will need your exact GPS coordinates as well as your height above sea level (simply googled my area) plus the actual above ground metres of your antenna.
3 Next I submitted my BSC (Binance smart chain) METAMASK address, added contract info, import token etc.
4 I went back to the defli site and clicked on ground station to set it up on a new SD card (If you keep the Helium SD card you can always change cards and go back to mining Helium at a later date) Set a user name and password for defli and went to Helium conversion and full Raspberry Pi install. (We had already downloaded Raspberry Pi imager software from the play store).
5 Write to the SD card, we did - other general purpose operating system - Ubuntu - picked a model 4 64 bit - storage - SD card - settings - host name - enable SSH - Yes - set user name and password and save. (It should take around 10 minutes to write to the card, then we powered off and put the SD card into the Raspberry Pi in our Helium miner.
6 We had also already downloaded putty so we could install (copy and paste) the lines of code we needed to run our defli station. The code is available here basicbitcoinstrategy.com as well as some written instructions.
7 Watch our defli tokens roll in.
There is a complete video with instructions here on how to do your conversion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A6hIssgbtE This is not some shillers video though, it is a member of the Defli community that used to be a big help to people in the Helium community, this was his first video but it is really helpful and if you follow the steps it makes the process quite simple.
We have the Defli token imported to Metamask and receive them every epoch (4 hours). The tokens are only on Sushi swap at the moment but as it is a very new project the liquidity is low so there is an active P2P marketplace for buying and selling your Defli tokens. We currently have 17,000.
Now as the Helium halving is due very soon and my rewards are not even covering the minimal electricity costs I thought it was worth a try with Defli but as always DYOR. The bonus here is I have already ROI'ed on the cost of my conversion after less than a month.
As always, thank you for reading and feel free to comment.
