Source code?
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Firstly, I like to say I feel bad for all of the employees of Pycom LTD. I wish you all well in your future endeavors. I have successfully onboarded a Pycom Helium Hotspot and it is a great performing hotspot, every bit as good as a RAK v2, which is somewhat of an industry benchmark. My problem is that I cannot onboard the others I bought because the maker account is exhausted of Data Credits for onboarding, and the one that I have running will not receive future OTA updates. Others are in the same boat that I am. Would it be possible for someone to post the source code for the Pycom hotspot so that the DIY crowd can manually update the miner docker in the future when changes are made on the helium end? Thanks.
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@DC you can try contacting the administrators (listed on Pycom’s home page). Until there is a final decision to sell or liquidate they should try to keep the business as a going concern and support existing customers.
From the statement on Pycom’s home page:
The Administrator (…) is to keep existing customers supported during this time.
Otherwise you can file to be recognised as a creditor to the company, though depending on the exact situation and outcome that may or may not result in anything.
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@jcaron That won't work. The security chip in the hotspot is keyed to the maker. I could send helium data credits to Pycom's manufacturer account and then try to onboard the hotspot - hoping nobody else uses the credit before I do. Best I can hope for is that another company takes over and funds the account, or part of the administration process would be to fund the account with enough credit to cover all the hotspots shipped but not yet online.
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@DC if you can ssh into the box you can probably somehow change the account used to one with enough credits?
Sorry if that’s completely false, I’m not really into the whole Helium stuff.
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@jcaron
Thanks for helping us understand how this all works.
I guess all we can do is wait and hope for the best.
I do have SSH access and some people in the Helium community said that it shouldn't be that difficult to manually update the miner docker when helium releases a new version. I'm not sure how true that is, I am not a coder. As far as onboarding goes, maybe the Administrators will fund their Helium wallet with enough DC to onboard the hotspots that were shipped to customers.
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@DC this will probably need to wait until the end of the administration process. Currently the administrators are seeking bids from potential buyers of the company or some of its assets, that source code being one of those assets.
Either someone buys the company or some of its assets including that source code, and it will be their decision to support the users of those devices or possibly publish the source code, or nobody buys it and then former Pycom management could probably release it as open source. Though I wouldn’t hold by breath for that.
I believe someone had found how to get ssh access to the box and published the details around here, didn’t they?