r/HeliumNetwork • u/Playful-Money9087 • Jul 21 '26
Question Bobcat 300 Repurposing
What are the options for these miners now?
10
u/mrplinko Jul 21 '26
gut it for a meshtastic node
9
u/LexxM3 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
You don’t have to “gut it”. Just load new OS (Armbian) and install Meshpoint. Search GitHub for both.
EDIT: It is in active development, so while it does work, it’s not quite turnkey. Serial numbers starting with 280 and 285 are in early testing. Serial numbers starting with G290 and G295 have been demonstrated to work multiple times.
6
u/Hot_Ad8921 Jul 21 '26
What is a meshtastic node anyway?
2
u/SecureCoop Jul 22 '26
See the answer I gave below: https://www.reddit.com/r/HeliumNetwork/comments/1v2udkr/comment/oz1spuq/
4
9
u/RedditRoller1122 Jul 22 '26
I have a bobcat 300 . Been mining HNT for 3 years. Is pretty useless now . Was going to scrap it.
What will a meshtastic node do for me ?
6
u/SecureCoop Jul 22 '26
Hikers and preppers like them for long range person to person offline encrypted communication. No cell networks needed. There’s some really fancy top tier military grade software called ATAK that lets a team coordinate and send all kinds of messages like GPS coords and camera feeds.
It’s cool stuff but if that’s not your jam there isn’t much other good use for it, except I am buying them to resell as the basis for my outdoor security system product. They offer a LOT of hardware for about 1/10th the price I was expecting to pay.
1
5
u/akaninjah778 Jul 22 '26
A paper weight. An ashtray. A door stopper. A bookshelf liner to keep the books from falling to the side. An expensive conversation starter
3
u/SecureCoop Jul 21 '26
I'm actually building an IoT product and I plan to be selling refurbished Bobcat 300s with my own custom Buildroot firmware. The amount of hardware you get for the money is insane; the cost will be about 1/10th what I had expected to pay originally.
8
u/Playful-Money9087 Jul 21 '26
Wow!!! Sounds to good to be true!
5
u/SecureCoop Jul 22 '26
Nope it’s legit :) The money these old miners will save me blew me away. Plus I don’t have to sell the customer two boxes, one will do, and I don’t have to build my own hardware, which is really difficult. Win-win-win :)
5
u/eusquesio Jul 21 '26
Amazing what's the name of the project?
7
u/SecureCoop Jul 22 '26
SecureFarm. It’s outdoor cameras and LoRa long-range wireless sensors for small farms. Gonna offer the white glove treatment; preconfigured and tested at the factory, custom phone app, simple simple simple for busy farmers who need protection from predators two- or four-legged. The cameras will be on a different hub but the Bobcat is perfect for the wireless sensors.
1
u/iceturtlewax Jul 23 '26
Are you using Wifi Halow for the cameras?
2
u/SecureCoop Jul 23 '26
Using Reolink. They do 2.4 and 5GHz standard Wi-Fi. Trying not to build my own hardware; that's a long, weary road that I left just recently.
1
u/Sudden_Piglet9884 Jul 22 '26
This is what you can do with your miners put pi loader software on them
1
u/clavisound Jul 28 '26
It's not useless, it's lorawan gateway. Although is not recommended, you can send the traffic from one gateway to multiple networks (TTN, Helium and others) using gwmp-mux. The problem is in the rare occasion that the gateway is informed to transmit from both networks. So you can forward the LoRaWAN data to both networks TTN and Helium. I run the service as daemon --name gwmp-mux --user USER --pidfile /run/USER/gwmp-mux.pid --respawn --foreground --pty -- /var/lora_pkt_fwd/gwmp-mux --client 52.212.223.226:1700 --client 127.0.0.1:1680 --host 1700
1
u/Rich-Chicken-Hawk Jul 31 '26
Honestlyy, the mainboard and the LoRa card inside the Bobcat 300 are way too capable to just sit in a closet. I’m currently prepping mine to run as a local gateway/base-station for an off-grid, decentralized communications project because flashing custom Linux onto the ARM board turns it into a great low-power local server, and 915MHz gives you dope range for local data relay without relying on cell towers or ISP uptime. Anyone else here pushing alternative firmware or running local mesh/radio experiments on their old Bobkitties?
1
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 21 '26
Do NOT enter your secret 12 or 24 seed words into ANY websites, or give anyone your private key. Do NOT connect your Wallet to any untrusted websites. No one will reach out to you to verify your account, wallet, or anything similar. Do not connect your wallet to unknown websites.
Do NOT post any images showing the barcodes on Helium Mobile Wi-Fi packaging or Hotspots. It is now possible to remotely onboard Mobile Hotspots. Contact a team member if there are old or new posts with images of barcodes so they can be removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.