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Nebra Ltd / Pi Supply

Application to become an approved third party manufacturer as per HIP19

Summary

Nebra Ltd (also trading as Pi Supply, StakeBox, and JustBoom) is an electronics manufacturer and retailer with experience in both the cryptocurrency and LoRa industries.

We are proposing to make both an indoor Helium Hotspot Miner and an IP67 rated Outdoor Helium Hotspot Miner.

Outdoor Helium Hotspot Miner

Company Information

Nebra Ltd (also trading as Pi Supply, StakeBox, and JustBoom) is a manufacturer of embedded electronics devices including LoRa, UPS modules, epaper displays, high quality audio, casing and accessories and more. The company was established in 2008 and since then we have sold many hundreds of thousands of our own brand products through our own websites and through our network of over 100 resellers and distributors worldwide (including Digi-key, Arrow, Sparkfun, Adafruit and many more).

We have been working with LoRa products for a few years now and have been actively engaged in the LoRa community as part of The Things Network and various industry related events. We have also been involved in a variety of cryptocurrency projects through our work on StakeBox. As Helium effectively brings both of these sides of the business together we feel that this was perhaps inevitable :-).

Some useful company info

  • UK Company number - 06732600
  • UK VAT number - GB946140037
  • WEEE registration - WEE/HA4235XX
  • ICO registration - ZA139031

Product Information

We have two products in the works:

Helium Outdoor Hotspot Miner

Product Status: Fully Functional Physical Prototypes, First units off production line are being tested. Estimted Price: £350.00 ex VAT Image: See here

Our Helium Outdoor Gateway would be the Helium Variant of our Smart LoRa Gateway and features the following:

  • Powered By Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+, 32GB EMMC Variant.
  • Comes with a LoRa Concentrator.
  • Power Over Ethernet using the 802.3af standard.
  • WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.
  • Comes in IP67 Case rated for outdoors use, along with a glass fiber 3 dBm Antenna.
  • Comes with Nebra ECC Key to securely store swarm keys.

Helium Indoor Hotspot Miner

Product Status: In Development. First prototypes to be built shortly. Estimated Price: £250 ex VAT

At the same time we are now developing an indoor variant of our Outdoor Gateway, while still in design stages our rapid prototyping ability should allow us to target a quick launch for this.

It plans to feature the following:

  • Powered By Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+, 32GB EMMC Variant.
  • Comes with a LoRa Concentrator.
  • Comes in a stylish case.
  • Powered by 12V DC Barrel Jack.
  • Wi-Fi, Bluetooth & Ethernet Connectivity
  • Comes with Nebra ECC Key to securely store swarm keys.

Both Units

We are currently actively looking into software distribution for this product to ensure it is secure and up to date. Methods currently being discussed is using docker containers for distribution or a third party service such as balenaCloud.

Our goal is to ensure that the devices have frequent updates while ensuring high uptime.

Customer Support

As we already run our own web shop, Amazon and eBay stores, and a sizeable distributor network we have a well established order and technical support setup, as well as being able to manage faulty returns and replacements with ease.

We provide standard product warranties on everything we sell and on top of this we also have substantial product liability insurance and goods in transit insurance to cover all shipments. This is to ensure that we are able to fulfill our obligations even in the most extreme and unlikely of circumstances.

Hardware Security

Currently we are planning the following:

  • Helium gateways will store their swarm_key on an ECC chip as requested. As well as providing some security this should mean if the operating system becomes corrupted that the user can recover their miner with ease.
  • We will be more than happy to submit prototypes for audit.

Other hardware measures currently are not planned due to environmental commitments (potting the entire gateway prevents repairability). However is something we'll actively look into and improve on.

Manufacturing Information

We have been manufacturing and distributing our own brand products for over 10 years and work with a number of trusted manufacturing partners. We will use these trusted partners for the Helium gateways so as not to introduce any unknowns into the manufacturing process. We also have strong relationships with a variety of electronics component suppliers such as Avnet and Verical and will use these relationships to ensure we have resilience in our supply chain.

Proof of Identity

Have submitted this information to @jamiew via email. Can be confirmed in a comment.

Budget & Capital

We intend to proceed with a first batch of 5000 to 10000 pcs but we can scale this up should the pre-order demand require it. As a business with a 10 year track record we have a great relationship with our bank and we also have trade finance and invoice finance in place so we can maximise our cashflow availability throughout the manufacture and sales process. If necessary, we also have investment partners that we can leverage should there be a need to do so, however this is a last resort.

Risks & Challenges

We have tested the electronics design thoroughly already and the core LoRa hardware had been well proven by us and our customers over the last few years. We also have a lot of experience with manufacturing our own hardware, so we don't anticipate any issues. The packaging design and all other aspects of the project are nearly finalised.

The main risks and challenges are the supply of the components and assembly of the associated electronics as well as the reliability of the shipping networks.

Fortunately the manufacturer we are working with is one we have successfully used many times before and we know and trust they can deliver to schedule. As an established and busy e-commerce business Nebra are easily capable of handling the shipping burden of this project and have all the frameworks in place to achieve this quickly and efficiently. Whilst delays do unfortunately sometimes occur with shipping networks these are relatively infrequent and we will do our best to mitigate these at the time of shipping. We will be using DHL for our shipping and the shipping is fully insured and tracked. If volumes are high enough we will probably use a shipping partner such as Floship to ship the rewards directly from our manufacturer to backers and to leverage their staff and capacity to speed up the shipping. We have done this in the past with success.

With current component availability, a 10000 unit batch of boards would take about 8 to 10 weeks to produce. We will place the first production order immediately when we get manufacturer approval.

Other information