Dear RAKwireless Technical Support Team,
I am writing to request your assistance regarding a fleet of Nebra HNT Indoor Hotspot Miners that contain RAK LoRa concentrator modules.
Background:
Following the bankruptcy of Nebra Ltd and the collapse of the Helium HNT mining project, we own a significant number of Nebra Indoor Hotspot Miners that are now idle. We would like to fully repurpose these devices for standard LoRaWAN gateway and IoT edge computing applications.
Hardware Inside Each Unit:
- Raspberry Pi 4 (base compute module)
- RAK LoRa Concentrator module (RAK2245 / RAK2287, SX1301/SX1302 based)
- 32GB eMMC running Balena OS (Nebra custom build)
- 1GbE Ethernet, USB 3.0, HDMI
The Problem:
The devices currently boot from internal eMMC with Nebra’s locked Balena OS. We have attempted the following without success:
- Flashing microSD with Raspberry Pi OS Lite — device ignores SD card
- rpiboot via USB on Windows — device not detected
- SSH on port 22222 — requires public key authentication (no key available)
What We Are Asking:
- Is there an official procedure or tool from RAKwireless to unlock or re-flash these devices?
- Can the RAK LoRa module be used independently with a standard Raspberry Pi OS + ChirpStack setup once the OS is replaced?
- Do you have a recommended firmware or image for converting these units into standard LoRaWAN gateways?
We have a large number of these units and are very motivated to give them a productive second life as proper IoT gateways. Any guidance, documentation, or tooling you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Device Details:
- Model: Nebra HNT Indoor Hotspot (NBR-0063, Raspberry Pi 4 based)
- LoRa Module: RAK2245 / RAK2287 (please confirm if you can identify from serial)
- Frequency: EU868
- Current OS: Balena OS (Nebra custom, locked)
Thank you very much for your support.
Best regards,
Dr. Babak Sarkhoshpour