Table of Contents
Contents
How it All Started
A few months ago, my brother told me I should get into helium mining. There’s a long personal story here but basically, I need some extra cash to pay for my mother’s assisted living bill. My brother told me that people were making upwards of $500 a month, just by sticking a small wifi hotspot device on their windows. I had nothing to do during the pandemic so I decided to go for it.
Now, my brother had bought Bobcat miners and was waiting for them to be delivered in November. But then he mentioned that another company had come onboard and seemed to be shipping faster than Bobcat. The company, Seeed, is based in Shenzhen, China and makes IoT devices. (I”m going to write this post like the layperson I am so if you don’t know what IoT is, it means “Internet of Things.” In very simple terms, it’s how these days, we have all these devices like Amazon Echo and Fitbit that connect to the Internet and do things for us.)
Ordering my SenseCAP M1 from SEEED
I checked out Seeed and they said they had helium miners — the SenseCAP M1 — ready to ship in November. The only catch was that you had to transfer $500+ bucks to China. From reading Reddit, a lot of people thought this was suss (i.e., suspicious for the laypeople) but I didn’t have a problem with this. I used to live in the UK and I’m used to transferring money across international borders. I thought this might give me an advantage because interestingly, you could place your SenseCAP M1 order no problem, but then you had just five days to transfer them the money. I wondered whether a lot of people would order their SenseCAPs but then back out when it came to payment.
I don’t know if I was right or what but SURPRISE…my SenseCAP arrived via DHL on Monday October 4th. NOT November 10th as advertised. SCORE. Joke is on my brother here because my SenseCAP arrived before some of the Bobcats he ordered. I don’t think he was very happy with all the pics I sent him of my SenseCAP. Once I was done with work for the day, I opened up my DHL package and started setting things up.
Initial Setup of My SenseCAP M1: Installing Firmware
Before you plug ANYTHING in, attach the antenna to the device. NEVER attach or unattach the antenna while the SenseCAP is plugged in. This thing is sensitive.
I attached my antenna and plugged in my SenseCAP M1 around 8 pm ET on Monday, October 4th. I tried to read the instructions but the SenseCAP doesn’t come with much. What I didn’t realize is that before you can really do anything, the SenseCAP has to update its firmware. So my advice to those getting SenseCAPs, just plug in your miner and connect it to the Ethernet and then do NOTHING for 45 minutes. Just let it sit there. (I recommend setting up your miner with Ethernet rather than WiFi. It will be faster. For example, my Ethernet cable delivers 130 Mbps consistently, whereas my WiFi can fluctuate anywhere from 30 Mbps to 100 Mbps. My WiFi rarely gets to 130 Mbps.) The SenseCap cannot sync to the blockchain until you have updated the firmware. You may get an error like “There was an error constructing the Add Hotspot transaction. Please try again.” if you try to do anything before the firmware updates. Note a lot of sites say 10 to 15 minutes to update firmware but I think because so many SenseCaps are coming onboard, everything is taking longer. (This will be a consistent theme.) Better safe than sorry. Wait 45 minutes.
What to Do While Installing Firmware: App and Dashboard Setup
- Install the Helium app on your phone and bookmark helium.explorer.com on your desktop and phone. You will be referencing these a lot! Note that the Helium app requires a 12 word seed phrase. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE write all these words down in a very safe place. I hope you use a password locker like Dashlane or Lastpass to store everything. (Use my Dashlane referral link to get six months free of Dashlane.) I also had to set up a numerical passcode (6 digits) for the app which I also recommend writing down somewhere safe.
- Sign up for the SenseCAP dashboard. https://status.sensecapmx.cloud/ You’ll need the details on the bottom of the SenseCAP to do this. This dashboard is where you are going to spend the next five days, watching the blockchain download.
- Sign up for Discord and join the SenseCAP community and the Helium community.
5 Days to Sync to the Blockchain: Take a Trip Out of Town
OK, once the firmware is updated, now you’re ready to sync to the blockchain! All of a sudden, your device will have a name! You can also choose to Assert Location now BUT only do this now if you are SURE that your device will be located where you are setting it up. If you are planning on putting the device somewhere far away from the setup area, don’t assert location right now. In my case, I was setting up my SenseCAP in the office, but it would ultimately live 12 feet away in the living room, so I was fine. I went ahead and asserted my location and saw my device on the Helium app dashboard, in its crowded little hex (more about hexes later). Syncing to the Blockchain is a painful process. You will be SO close for the last 48 hours. But it will slow to a crawl and you will wonder if something is wrong. You will notice Reddit and Discord FULL of people asking if there’s something wrong. You just gotta be patient. In my case, I found that my device was syncing about 60 blocks an hour towards the end but the blockchain was also growing by about 40 blocks an hour, so I was only gaining 20 blocks an hour really. SLOW. Painful. My advice is to step away from the screen, head out of town, and just assume that your device will take 5 ENTIRE DAYS to go through all its motions. Remember I started my process Monday night. Things didn’t really kick off for me until Saturday morning.
Receiving Your First Rewards: Don’t Be Greedy
In my case, syncing to the Blockchain took from Monday night to Friday morning initially. Then, nothing happened. But at 2:33 pm ET on October 1st, I received my first mining reward! A packet transfer of…get this….00000548 HNT. I received a small reward as a Challenger at 11:10 pm ET that night. Another packet transfer at 12:35 am on Tuesday October 2nd. Another Challenger reward at 7:37 am ET on October 2nd. And then my first Witness reward of .0184 HNT occurred at 8:08 am on Saturday October 2nd.
Placement of Your Miner and Buying a Breadpan
I am still experimenting with this but the basic advice is get your device outside if you can (but not behind a metal screen) and get that antenna up as high as you can get it. Giving the SenseCAP a clear line of sight seems to be a good thing. I live in a mid-rise building on a high floor and so when I look out my windows, I have a clear view. There are no other buildings in my way. I do not have a weatherproof box and my patio gets direct sun in the afternoon, so I’ve been bringing the SenseCap outside in the mornings and evenings, but keeping it inside during the day. (You don’t want the CPU to go over 60 degrees Celsius –the SenseCAP dashboard shows you the CPU temperature and somewhere in the tech specs online, they explain the acceptable CPU temperature range.) Right now, my SenseCAP is stacked on a tall bar stool with a large Amazon box on top of it. And then, uh, a bread pan. And then my SenseCAP. There’s a guy on the Internet and Reddit who explains that a metal grounding pan can help reflect radio waves. A breadpan does the trick. I found that I went from 12 witnesses to anywhere from 30 to 45 witnesses, just by using the breadpan.
Checking Your Possible Witnesses: More is Better (AKA Disco Mode)
In the Helium app, you can hit the little settings icon on your device’s name and choose Discovery Mode. This will scan the surroundings for other devices. I don’t really understand the particulars, but you want A LOT of witnesses. More witnesses mean more challenges and more chances to witness. I think. I’m still trying to figure this part out. You can check for witnesses five times a day, so I recommend being organized about this. Pick a few locations in your house that you are considering as Hotspot locations and test the number of witnesses from these points. (Don’t forget the breadpan.) You will get different numbers each time you test so in the beginning, perhaps choose two different locations and test twice in one day from each location. But remember…you want high locations with clean lines of sight. Ideally not behind a screen. Outdoor if you can swing it but ONLY if you can get the device in a weather proof box that will keep it COOL and DRY. Basically, if you are only getting like 8 witnesses, I don’t think you’re going to make much money.
How to Actually Make Money: Challenges, Beacons, Witnesses, and Data Transfers
I’m still trying to figure this out myself but I’ve cobbled together this list of insights from Discord and Reddit:
To maximize your HNT rewards…
- Your hotspot should issue a challenge every 240 blocks or so. (Maybe about every four hours.) So once you see your hotspot issue a challenge, you can check the height of the blockchain in the SenseCAP dashboard and get an idea as to when the next challenge will occur.
- You will receive a very small amount for issuing a challenge. Very small. Being the hotspot in the “Challenged Beaconer” role is the least rewarding role according to the table on this page.
- The beacons you send should be seen by as many as possible. You want to be the “Sent Beacon” hotspot. Typically, according to online sources, you will beacon 3 times a day. I just reviewed my beacons and I’ve beaconed anywhere from 1x a day to 5x a day. As of October 6th, 2021, when you beacon, you can be witnessed by up to 18 hotspots. (Was 25. Then went down to 10. Now up to 18.)
- The beacons you send will be rewarded with your reward scale. So if your reward scale is .5 like mine is (sadface), not much love in sending beacons. (Not that you can avoid sending beacons though.)
- The beacons you witness will be rewarded with the reward scale of the one sending the beacon. So hopefully the hotspot sending the beacon will have a .81 or higher reward scale. (I mean, 1.0 is ideal but beggars can’t be choosers.) Right now, witnessing is where the money is at.
- The beacons you witness should be seen by only you to get max reward. (This probably won’t happen. But one can hope.) If you’re one of many witnesses, rewards will be lower.
- You can also earn HNT for data transfer. You’ll see this listed as “Transferred Packets” on the Helium Explorer. The amounts are very small in South Florida right now but the idea is that people (and devices) will start using the Helium network over time and this will increase. (I just earned .00000462 HNT for data transfer a few minutes ago.) I’m still trying to figure out where these data transfers are coming from. There was a small group of people using Helium tabs but they aren’t selling these anymore.
Things I Learned the Hard Way
The Helium app for your phone is often out-of-date. Like in the beginning, it would say I was offline even though I was online. And it wouldn’t reflect my earnings. The SenseCAP dashboard is more important than the Helium app…it is your source of truth.
Don’t try to assert your location immediately. Someone on Discord says if you don’t assert your location immediately, your miner will sync to the blockchain a lot faster. (This person claimed 30 minutes which I doubt but hey I don’t know.) Who knows if she is right but…but…don’t be so eager to set everything up immediately. Just let the firmware install and then let the blockchain sync.
Firmware updates are a drag. SenseCAP pushed out a firmware update on October 5th and my hotspot did nothing for most of the day and then the dashboard started telling me that my P2P status was unhealthy. On days like this, just chill and wait it out. Go for a long walk. I did end up unplugging my unit and then plugging it back in but I don’t really know if that helped with anything.
Earnings My First Week
As I write this, it’s Saturday morning, a week after I feel my SenseCap M1 really came to life. I’ve made a grand total of 1.753 HNT. So…not going to pay my mom’s assisted living bills anytime soon but hopefully a year from now, I’ll have enough to pay one month of her bill. (Roughly $2000 a month.) I did have to deal with the SenseCap firmware update, which took my earnings down to .10 on that day, and I’ve had to experiment a lot with placement. I feel like I’ve got the device in a good location now and am hopeful I can get up to 3 HNT a week.
Why Does My Sent Beacon Have Zero Witnesses?
Look up the Challenger. If they are relayed or have otherwise shitty status, there are just too many obstacles for you to get witnesses. Basically, something gets in the way between their challenge and you.
How Come I Created a Challenge but Then Nothing Happened?
I wish they showed us more information about this but I think what has happened here is that you created the challenge but then whoever was supposed to send the beacon flaked. Maybe the hotspot was offline or relayed. It kinda stinks that you can create challenges that just die and go nowhere but I’m sure there’s a good reason for it. Note I’ve generally found that when your hotspot creates a challenge, it will take about an hour for the next step of “Challenged Beaconer.” So be patient but also don’t be surprised if nothing happens. There are a lot of devices coming online that aren’t optimized just yet or are relayed.
What Else?
I’ll keep updating this post as I learn other things. Two things I want to try:
Moving my antenna outside. However, I’m using the stock SenseCAP antenna and I’m not sure it’s waterproof. I was able to get a 1 meter cable from Amazon so I can keep the miner inside and thread the antenna out my patio door to my balcony. But I get pretty direct Florida sun from around 9 am to 6 pm ET so I’m not sure if the antenna will melt.
While there’s a lot of stuff online that says height and placement matter more than the antenna you use, I do have a 5dbi antenna coming from SEEED in November. (I am hoping that they will overdeliver like they did with the miner and it will arrive next week!) This antenna is an indoor/outdoor antenna.
