Preliminary note : what are the "" and "" challenges about ?
Expend the frontiers of knowledge . Create something new, study something undiscovered, or replicate and verify scientific studies.
Automate your life. [...] Mak your life and others' live easier by reducing manal tasks that suck the life out of you.
Camps for science and automation
Two "camps" at the cross border of citizen science and automation has structured our ptotoyping work at the begining :
the "Ethereum Camp" is about connecting the sensors to a local blockchain to enable autonomous energy transactions between energy peers
Those camps are actually part of broader camps :
CitizenWatt Camp : citizen energy sensor development
What's "CitizenWatt" ?
CitizenWatt Sensor : make it work [Technical]
The first step was to compare the hardware part to make sure there were no issues compared to a CitizenWatt sensor that works :
We ended up with five working CitizenWatt sensors.
Once the CitizenWatt sensors are working it is necessary to couple the sensor to a Raspberry PI in order for the CW-sensor to communicate the data it senses (through RF in this v1 version of the board and through Low Energy Bluetooth in the coming v2 version of the board). This means that it is necessary to install the CitizenWatt disk image and interface on the Raspberry Pi.
It turns out that it works well with the Raspberry Pi 1 but it doesn't work with the more recent ones since this is not the same architecture. This leads us to another issue then : we need to build the CitizenWatt UX image and boot for a Raspberry PI 3 (that is more powerfull than a Raspberry 1 and might be right to mine as an ethereum node). Clement D., one of the core developer of CitizenWatt thus took some with us to build and test.
However, we did test the good functioning of the CitizenWatt on site with a Raspberry Pi 1 install... and it worked well. However, it turned out that RF is not powerful enough to push data from one floor to the other in the house.
Ethereum Camp : energy transaction automation
As part of the development of some bricks of the DAISEE program, two of the main technological bricks are:
How to make Smart Energy Monitoring/Meter IoTs work like Ethereum blockchain nodes that can talk to each other via a local blockchain, as well as make and validate transactions ?
How to automate the transactions management ?
Setting-up the ground
Preliminary steps we required to adress the mining capacity on Raspberry PI 3 or any other supporting device :
For a DApp demo, see
Ethereum mining nodes on Raspberry PI 3 or any other support
We do not have so much trouble to make Raspberry PI working like an ethereum node of a common private blockchain. Our issues come from the fact that in order for the nodes to participate to the validation and transmission of blocks to the common private blockchain, it is necessary for this node to have mined at least once to generate the DAG file (necessary for the propagation of the blocks in the blockchain). The fact is that for the moment raspberry pi (1, 2 or 3) does not have enough power to mine.
Increase the swap memory of the card
Generate the DAG file without mining (meaning to generate the DAG file on a computer and copy it onto the Raspberry card)
Enhancing citizen science and automation : hackathons, meet-up and working groups
Both the Citizenatt and Ehtereum Camps have been fed and feeding other dynamics that aim at enhancing the citizen root of th projet and the will for building autonomous energy systems. Amongst those dynamics two of them have been relatively important in 2016, along with the Hackaday Prize.
CompteurConnect Hackathon
The #CompteurConnect hackathon held by the French ministry for environment, energy and ecology has given the DAISEE team the opportunity to:
Make the project vision clear & work on the global design of the project
This smart contract is the first energy peer-to-peer contract based on the Ethereum blockchain. It works more or less... still need improvement and it's modest in its structure and on what it is doing but still... the first energy smart contract.
Blockfest #1