Frequently Asked
Questions

Smart Harvest Instruments

Smart Harvest Instruments is a team of Canadian tech experts with backgrounds in telecommunications, consumer electronics, and IOT. Our mission is to lower the cost and complexity barriers in modern communications tech, empowering both people and businesses to accomplish their goals.

The HL100 is designed and certified to be used in Canada and the United States only.

The HL100 is designed for indoor use. However, you’re free to experiment with third-party outdoor enclosures. Just keep in mind that water damage will void your warranty. Modifying the product – including opening the enclosure – will also void the warranty and may result in Helium black listing the unit.

It is generally not recommended to place multiple miners close to each other. The combined reward may still be higher, but that depends on how many other miners are nearby. There’s a lot that goes into calculating hotspot rewards, we recommend looking at Helium’s documentation on this subject.

Yes! The Smart Harvest HL100 Light Hotspot is officially approved by the Helium Foundation for the Helium IOT Network. You can validate this by going to https://www.helium.com/mine and searching for Smart Harvest in the list of approved hotspot makers.

Orders & Shipping

We currently ship anywhere in Canada and the USA.

Our average shipping time is 3 to 5 days. All our shipments are sent directly from Canada or the USA.

No, our shipments will come to you from either Canada or the USA to match the country of your shipping address.

Orders, Refunds, & Warranties

We will email you when your order status changes. When the order is shipped, you will receive a tracking link.

Please contact us to make changes to your order.

We offer full refunds for unopened miners within 30 days of original purchase. If your situation is different, please contact us and we’ll see what we can do.

Each hotspot comes with a 12 month warranty. Any hotspot that is produced with a defect or damaged during shipping will be immediately replaced or refunded within the warranty timeframe. See our warranty policy for more details.

HotSpot Mining

The amount an HL100 will mine depends a lot on the number of other Helium hotspots in your area and how well your hotspot is positioned to receive and transmit. Our users see dozens to hundreds of Helium IOT tokens mined per day.

You can find the exchange rate for tokens on sites like https://coinmarketcap.com/ 

As part of the onboarding process, your HL100 will be connected to your wallet in the Helium Wallet app. You’ll be able to claim your mining rewards there as well.

From your Helium Wallet app you’ll be able to transfer the tokens to a decentralized exchange or a centralized exchange (like Coinbase or Crypto.com), and use that to convert the tokens into dollars.

We offer email support for issues directly related to the HL100 Hotspot Miner. To help with issues relating to the Helium Wallet or using crypto exchanges, we can offer pointers to other resources but cannot guarantee support for the services and products of other companies.

The IOT protocol token is backed by the HNT token and can be converted to HNT using the Helium Wallet app. The conversion ratio is not 1:1 but set algorithmically by Helium’s smart contracts. Learn more about this in Helium’s documentation: https://docs.helium.com/tokens/iot-token

Yes, the HL100 can be set up anywhere in your home as long as there’s power and ethernet networking. For the best mining results, we recommend placing it close to a window and raised from the floor, with as much sky in view as possible.

When Helium did their big network upgrade in 2023, a new reward structure was introduced. Now, each network running on Helium is rewarded with protocol tokens that are specific to that network. For the IoT segment of the network, this means earning Helium IOT protocol tokens instead of HNT.

HL100 Onboarding

To onboard the HL100 you’ll need to use our Onboarding Web App at https://onboarding.smartharvest.ca/ alongside the Helium Wallet App. Check out our quickstart guide for more details: https://smartharvest.ca/quick-start-guide-hl100/

The HL100 cannot be onboarded with bluetooth and just the Helium Wallet App. You’ll need to use our Onboarding Web App at https://onboarding.smartharvest.ca/ alongside the Helium Wallet App. Check out our quickstart guide for more details: https://smartharvest.ca/quick-start-guide-hl100/

As part of the Onboarding process you should expect to see a prompt similar to this after you press Continue on the Set Hotspot Location page (example here).

If this doesn’t show up, you may need to enable Location Services for your smartphone’s web browser.

On iPhone and using Safari:

Please double check your location permissions by doing the following:

  • Settings App -> Privacy & Security -> Location Services -> Safari Websites
  • Change the “Allow location access” to “While Using the App”
  • Enable “Precise Location”

Example here.

If you saw a “Hotspot Onboarded!” message in the Smart Harvest Onboarding Web App, then your HL100 has been successfully onboarded.

The message will look something like this.

Check your network configuration on your modem or router. If there are any settings like “don’t allow communication between devices on the network”, disable that setting and try onboarding again.

If you’re using the Moken or Hotspotty Explorers to check on the hotspot, it might take a day or two for them to show the hotspot online. As far as we know, they don’t update in 100% real-time.

If it’s still showing as offline in 2 or 3 days, please get in touch with us.

What each LED means from left to right when viewed from the front:

  1. Power (on/off)
  2. LoRa Radio Enabled
  3. Ethernet Traffic
  4. Onboarding Enabled

No, the HL100 does not require any port forwarding to work properly.

The HL100 is a Helium IoT Network Light Hotspot. The previous generation Full Hotspots used to required port forwarding.

Still have questions?