Buying random numbers

The Connected Humber CIC company has just made a substantial (for the company) investment in meaningless numbers. We’ve bought 150 tiny little memory chips, each of which comes loaded with a unique 32 bit number. We’re going to use the numbers the chips contain as IDs for devices we want to connect to the LoRa network.

The rules are changing in version 3.0 of the Lora wide area network, so that if you want to give your devices unique numbers they are not made for you, you have to get your own. And not just any old unique numbers, they want ones with some provenance. This is fair enough. It is rather important that we don’t have several devices sharing the same ID. When the chips arrive we’ll have to read the numbers out of them for us to use in our devices. Alternatively we could wire the chips in and have the hardware read them.

If we have any left over we can always sell them on to the highest bidder. There seems to be quite a market for meaningless unique numbers at the moment.