Let there be light!

In Helium news this week, our engineers lit up the LED light on the Helium Gateway board. The LED light will communicate a number of useful functions, including when your gateway is connected to the internet, if it’s in a consensus group, if it’s in pairing mode, and the status of the GPS. In addition to the gateway LED, you’ll always know the status of your gateway via the Wallet.

It’s so bright we had to put tape over it 😎

Testing Uber’s H3 with Helium

Last week, Uber announced their open-sourced H3: Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index, a grid system used to optimize ride pricing and dispatch by visualizing and exploring spatial data.

As Helium gears up for the launch of our decentralized machine network, our engineers have been looking for cool ways to visualize network coverage so we decided to give H3 a try. We even created an Erlang binding for it - you can check out in Uber’s Github. In the future, we plan on continuing to explore H3 and how it could be used within Helium’s blockchain solution. Stay tuned for updates!

Quick visualization with H3 and Helium Gateways

Welcome Amit 👋

Amit Levy is taking time from his busy schedule to work with Helium for the summer. Amit received his Computer Science PhD at Stanford and will be joining Princeton as an assistant professor this fall. Amit is interested in distributed systems, operating systems, security, privacy, programming languages and good will towards people, spending most of his time working on a new secure operating system for low-memory microcontrollers called TockOS (used in Helium radio modules).

At Helium, Amit will be making TockOS more power efficient and flexible so that a larger number of devices will be able to connect to the module. We’re thrilled to have Amit on the team!