Too expensive.
@mwaslam Not only very expensive but very hard to manage.
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@mwaslam definitely expensive, but it’s actually one of the shortest ROIs for a depin device, assuming you drive enough to make it worth it.
With freshness now enables the LC is earning around 13 points per km, assume $0.01 token price, this gives about 20k km to break even.
If you are a 1000km per week driver then it’s only a 20 week ROI
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The only reason its a no for me personally, is my driving is split almost 50/50 between my work truck and personal truck. Moving the ROVR back and forth is no big deal, or even buying a second wouldnt break the bank. The LC is a different story. I think if you drive daily with any decent mileage or km’age(?) its worth it. The price isnt going to stay at .1 forever IMO
Based on my current driving habits, I’m earning between 300 and 800 tokens per week. At that rate, it would take me approximately five years to recoup the cost of the unit. Can you provide projections or a breakdown showing how long it would realistically take to recover my investment under different earning scenarios?”
@patrick.sims58+a990caa5 the LC rewards different depending on speed and driving rural vs urban environments, so it’s hard to predict.
But you can assume 13 points per km for earnings, after freshness is now in effect.
So $2600 (after shipping) and 13 points per km, assuming $0.01 per token, means you need to map 20k km to break even, assuming no airdrop.
However the more LCs get into the wild, the more impacted freshness will become, and earnings will drop. Also Rovr has a fixed weekly emission for contributors; today we aren’t hitting that cap, but as more LCs get out there we will eventually, and at that point all earnings globally for that week get amoritzed to the emissions cap, which results in lowered rewards.
+annual halvings
All of that said, the LC is a great device to use and does have a nice ROI, but it assumes you drive enough to make it worth it.
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@Xrave I think I’ll try, the milage I drive city wide weekly is above average and as you said should be very rewarding now i’m updating over 10 GB weekly of information to the Bee device with another company so I’m sure this is going to be very rewarding
Is the suction cup mount usable on a glass sunroof?
Hi, I'm Xinran, COO of ROVR. AMA!
Chris and I are here from the ROVR team to answer any questions you have about the project. Fire away!
@Xinran_ROVR yes I have a question. I do not have a Mac device at home. All I have are iPads am I able to download that information at night at home with my Wi-Fi using my iPad Pro?
@patrick.sims58+a990caa5 they have a MacOS app for LC uploads, but not iOS
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Is ROVR planning an iOS or browser-based upload tool in the future.
Explore if using a cloud-based macOS service (like MacStadium or MacInCloud) would work for running the app remotely.
@patrick.sims58+a990caa5 they originally had one but it wasn’t working correctly so they removed it and went with just the desktop version.
I haven’t heard of any plans to bring back a mobile upload tool in the near future.
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One key callout that I mentioned in last week’s call is the data requirements. For urban driving environments expect the LC to capture ~1GB per km. So with the included 1TB hard drive you can expect ~1000km of driving before it’s full.
The difficult part, especially for fleet owners looking for drivers, is the driver needs an internet option that can support these data requirements. Currently you cannot upload from a phone and you must use Rovr’s upload app that is a Windows or MacOS program. Each day when you’re done driving you need to bring in the hard drive and upload while you sleep, and hopefully keep up with the uploads if your internet is fast enough and if you don’t have any upload connection failures. It is recommended to buy your own secondary hard drive to swap daily.
Based on the US’s average 45Mbps upload speed for hardwired internet that will take you ~5 hours of upload time for 100GB (100km) of daily driving.
The secondary concern are data caps. In the US 2 of the big 3 home ISPs (Comcast and Cox) have a ~1.2TB monthly cap where they will charge you if you go over…so if your driver does >1200km in a month, which isn’t a lot, then they will be stuck and you don’t get any rewards.
The data usage/internet issue combined with general security for the LC = having a driver parking in a secure garage, make the LC a very specialized piece of equipment where you want to spend the time to be sure you deploy to the right kind of driver. If you can find one then the rewards are great and is highly recommended to add it to your depin arsenal.
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@Xrave That seems like a lot for the average person to do. Hopefully they can figure out some kind of alternative.
@Bitbeard They decided not to put wifi on the device just because the data is so much that you’d have to leave your car running for such a long time to offload data in your driveway that it’s likely not feasible (and the LC uses a lot of power so not really feasible to plug it into a battery) + a lot of mobile plans have smaller data caps than home internet.
So the result is much higher rewards to try and make it worth the time for the driver.
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@Xrave I agree, I’m running a Bee and running around 2GB daily, when I’m home and connected to my wifi it take approximately 10min to upload close to one GB, (car running ) I can Imagine trying to upload one terabyte
I will do a guide similar to this in the near future for various methods of LC installation on non-metal roofs. This is an issue I ran into on both my cars and I ended up buying various mounting brackets to do high speed testing. Settled on a suction-mount designed for Starlink satellites
Despite the device being far more involved than I had intended, I’m enjoying using it and happy to say its already about to hit double ROI!
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@Yakob It is very fun to use. Everyone stares looking at it while driving. That suction thing you have is a good solution. How much did that cost you? And you have the perfect roof with the top that comes off easy to run the wires through there. Wonder does the rain creep in like that?
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@JD Yea same here. My pride wants to think its my car turning heads but I know it’s the LC :P
The mount with suction cups alone was 350, All in I probably spent another 5-6 hundred on LC accessories - I went a bit overboard with it. I didn’t want to risk putting a 2.5k machine on a cheap untested mount, especially because im in Texas where speed limits are actually speed suggestions.
I can honestly say that this mounting solution is far more rigid and safer than the factory one. I can pull on the bracket with my full weight, shaking the car back and forth, and the bracket will not budge.
My roof setup is perfect for the LC. Those safety cables clip into factory-mount quick release brackets where a light bar is meant to go. I could make the LC and all its equipment disappear in under a minute.. The roof gaps are heavily weatherproofed so the 2 inches of rain we get a year here shouldn’t be an issue
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Reminds me of the old message boards. I remember being really into a My Z TV board with Leo Laporte before Y2K. Yes, Im that old.
This isn’t a productive post but I’ll keep contributing. DePIN is a fun hobby that I enjoy and the Helium Deploy team has passed on great information to me.
I would, but I feel that I dont drive enough to justify the cost.
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