Dragino — LPS8 Data Only Helium Hotspot
Let’s talk about the differences between a Full, Light, and Data Only Hotspot
Early in my helium network ventures (April 2021) I heard about rumors of the so called “Light Hotspots”. With rumors of these hotspots being about half the price of current hotspots (speculation) this was very appealing. The main note to Light Hotspots is they do not store all blockchain data, as our “Full Hotspots” do now (this is why hotspots have to sync 24/7).
Full Hotspots will eventually become a Light hotspot through firmware updates (Target Completion: Q1 2022), allowing hotspots to become much more efficient with PoC activity as they will no longer commit challenges across the blockchain. Yes, that means we will lose 6% more of our current earnings, but in return our hotspots will be witnessing and beacon machines replacing the timely activity of a challenge into a witness or beacon activity.
Now that we are aware of those differences let’s go over a “Data Only” hotspot’s capabilities. The big question always is:
“Does it mine $HNT?”
In short, yes it absolutely does technically mine $HNT. The increments of rewards are minimal as they are solely based of the main utility of the network “Data Credits”. You might have seen something that looks like this before on your Full Hotspot.
These rewards are granted anytime an IoT sensor makes a valid connection with your hotspot, but your hotspot has to be the first one to process the data packet transfer to receive the reward. What these hotspot’s are great for is to expand sensor coverage for hard to reach areas like basements, boiler rooms, control rooms. You certainly will not want to put a regular hotspots in those areas to prove coverage, because they wont prove anything besides themselves.
Now onto the basics of setting up a Dragino LPS8 or DLOS8 (Data Only Hotspots). I highly recommend checking out the helium documentation for gateway-rs onboarding, they make it very clear what needs to be done on the software end. The video attached in the documentation found here as well, is how I personally learned to onboard my Dragino LPS8 units.
While this is certainly not plug and play this is a very interesting way of utilizing the helium network on another level. On the sensor side of things this is a dream come true for deployments as these units only run about $150, becoming very cost effective to expand and create redundant coverage without sacrificing a full hotspot’s PoC earnings.
For more information on the LPS8 or DLSO8 click those links or head over to https://www.dragino.com
BEWARE OF SCAMMERS AND SCALPERS! They will tell you this is a Light Hotspot when it certainly is not.
Purchase the Dragino LPS8 from these verified vendors:
