After the swivel by Helium Inc. in the direction of merely operating distributed WiFi hotspots after for years pushing LoRaWAN nodes, a lot of the related {hardware} grew to become successfully out of date. This led to fairly just a few of those Nebra LoRa Miners getting bought off, with the [Buy it Fix it] channel being a type of who sought to present these chunks of IP-67-rated computing {hardware} a brand new life.
Initially designed to be a part of the Helium Community Token (HNT) cryptocurrency mining operation, with customers getting rewarded by having these units working, they comprise pretty off-the-shelf {hardware}. As might be glanced from e.g. the Sparkfun product web page, it’s principally a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ on a breakout board with a RAK 2287 LoRa module. The thought within the video was to transform it right into a Meshcore repeater, which must be pretty simple, one would possibly assume.
Sadly the unit got here with a lifeless eMMC chip on the compute module, the LoRa module wasn’t suitable with Meshcore, and the Nebra breakout board solely covers the primary 24 pins of the usual RPi header on its pin header.
The options concerned utilizing a µSD card for the firmware as a substitute of the eMMC, and doing a little artistic routing on the underside of the breakout board to attach the unconnected pins on the breakout’s RPi header to the pins on the compute module’s connector. This manner a suitable LoRa module may very well be positioned on this header.
Relatively than shopping for an off-the-shelf LoRa module for the RPi and ready for supply, a customized module was assembled from an eByte E22 LoRa module and a few stripboard to check whether or not the contraption would work in any respect. Fortuitously a check of the system as a Meshcore repeater confirmed that it really works as meant, serving as a reasonably first rate proof-of-concept of the way to repurpose these techniques from a defunct crypto mining scheme right into a typical LoRa repeater, whether or not Meshcore or equal.
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