How to Keep Your RAK Helium Hotspot Online & Generating HNT
If your RAK Hotspot is offline and in need of attention, follow these steps to cure the problem and begin generating Helium Rewards again.
This tutorial may generically apply to all types of offline Helium hotspots but the directions are specific to:
RAKs shipped in 2021; RAK v1.5, RAK v2 and MNTD hotspots
Today (February 8, 2022), 77% of 556,533 hotspots are online. Of which 119,676 are RAK related miners. Roughly 25% of these are offline, but decreasing daily from a high of nearly 50%. That’s 29,919 RAK Helium Hotspots that are offline! If you’ve found your way here you are likely one of those owners of nearly 30,000 hotspots that are not only missing out on HNT rewards, but are also pretty frustrated with the fact that you are missing out on the idea of generating passive income with the Helium Network.
The problem centers around the stock 32 GB SD card that comes with your device. It has been proven the cards can easily become “corrupted” requiring you to re-flash or replace the SD card. The 32 GB is not robust enough so when replacing the SD card, make sure you upgrade and purchase at least a 64 GB High Endurance SD card.
To repair your Helium Hotspot follow the steps below.
Step 1: Identify if your Helium Hotspot Miner is truly offline
Create a Hotspotty account to receive realtime notifications about the health of your Helium Hotspot
The quickest and easiest way to discover the health of your Helium Hotspot is to use Hotspotty.net’s “Real Time Status Check” feature. First, enter the three-word name of your RAK Helium Hotspot in the search bar. Then navigate to “Status” and select “Status Check” which will provide a realtime update of your Helium hotspot’s health. If your device is confirmed offline, you will want to check the “Diagnostics” section associated with your specific hotspot within the Helium mobile app.
When in the diagnostics section of the Helium app, you’ll know if you will need to replace your SD card if you see;
- “Disk Error”
- the block is the same after running diagnostics a full day in between
- an outdated firmware version
- a very old block height
If your RAK hotspot acts similar to the below, you’ll know that you will need to replace your SD card if you see:
- does not boot up
- Cannot find a bluetooth connection after pressing the pairing button
- shows a solid or flashing green status LED
Step 2: Identify the location of your microSD card
- The microSD card is slightly hidden behind a thick piece of tape on the same side as your antenna port, next to the status LED light. However, it should be easy enough to find by referring to the image below. Carefully peel the tape back to expose the SD card. It’s important to note that your device should be unplugged before removing the SD card. See full instructions below.
The RAK MicroSD card is hidden behind a thick piece of tape (may be gold if you have a MNTD miner)
Step 3: Purchase, replace or re-flash the microSD card
Purchasing a pre-flashed card is the easiest way to go. Simply replace the damaged SD card with a new pre-flashed card and plug the device back into power. If your device was once correctly connected to the Helium Network it should automatically come back online by syncing to the correct block height and begin generating HNT rewards.
If you purchase a new SD card that has not been pre-flashed or would like to re-flash the existing card you will need to follow the steps listed below or in the attached video to ensure the RAK accepts the new card. Again, we recommend to upgrade to a 64 GB card to help your device manage both PoC as well as data transfer.
- First, unplug the hotspot from power.
- Carefully remove the MicroSD card. See the above photo on how to find the SD card port.
- Unless pre-flashed, you will need a card reader capable of reading and writing a microSD card.
- Then format the new card or re-format the existing card into ExFat format.
- Install the Etcher program to flash the card.
- Then download the image file to flash: https://helium-nextgate.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/artifacts/2021.09.27.0-sdcard.img.gz
- Next unzip the file.
- Use Etcher to flash the newly formatted card with the file.
- Place the newly flashed card back into microSD slot in the RAK hotspot.
- Plug the update RAK Hotspot back into power. It should come online and sync itself.
- If it fails to come online on its own, you will want to pair with bluetooth and connect to your networks WiFi to help it start the syncing process.
- Last, start earning HNT again!
If you prefer watching a how-to video over reading, watch this step-by-step tutorial on how to upgrade your RAK Helium Hotspot to keep it from going offline.
RAK Helium Hotspot SD Card Replacement “How-to” for downed or offline miners
Which exchanges are best to invest with and trade the Helium Network Token ($HNT)?
- Binance U.S., the worlds largest crypto exchange trades the most HNT volume daily.
- Crypto.com, has an easy to use mobile app which makes purchasing and selling HNT easy.
- Kucoin, the fifth largest exchange by volume recently adopted HNT and has quickly seen trading increase to $300,000+ daily.
Which exchanges are best to invest with and trade the Helium MOBILE Token ($MOBILE)?
- MEXC, is likely the largest and most credible place to purchase the Helium MOBILE Token with millions of U.S. dollars in $MOBILE being traded daily.
