SMOX — An Ethereum & IoT Hack Day Project
It doesn’t make any sense… It seems totally hopeless… You feel like giving up. You tried everything that came to your mind to solve that problem! And then you pause. You grab a coffee or a glass of water and suddenly there’s another idea! You go back to your place and you already feel this time it’s going to work. And guess what, it did!
At ThisGroup we try to regularly organize the so-called Hack Day. It allows us to zoom out from all the daily business and zoom in at another topic. Those topics can be anything that somehow relate to the things we do company wide.
And it’s exactly this opportunity I used to bring the idea SMOX to life with my colleague from Device Tools.
The idea was to create a box with cables for various devices coming out of it. You can plug in your device and in the first instance nothing will happen. That’s because the box will start charging as soon as it has enough balance on it. Instead of using real money, the SMOX accepts the cryptocurrency Ether.
This means the SMOX has its own wallet and constantly watches it. As soon as the balance increases, it translates the amount of Ether into charging minutes and starts charging.
But here comes the clue. As we most probably already know, the price of Ether changes drastically all the time. But a charging minute shouldn’t cost more or less just because the price of Ether has changed. To solve this issue, we first translate Ether to USD. But that also means a charging minute price constantly changes.
To make it clear how much a charging minute currently costs, there’s a screen integrated into the SMOX. It shows information like the current minute price in ETH, the remaining minutes it will charge and ultimately a QR code for the wallet address.
The SMOX consists of the following components:
- Arduino based power socket
- Different power supplies and cables
- Octavo Labs VerneMQ MQTT broker
- Server that watches an Ethereum wallet address and calculates the current minute price
- iPhone 5C with the SMOX app in Kiosk mode which is connected to the server to show the current minute price and the remaining charging minutes
- All of that packed into the remainings of an old shoe carton (I mean otherwise it wouldn’t be a real “hack” project, right?)
I know, I know, there are already plenty of public charging stations out there. Some of them are even for free. But that’s not the idea with the SMOX. Think of it as a showcase project. It perfectly demonstrates how the cryptocurrency Ether is being used as a trigger for an IoT action. And out of that idea we could develop so many other great things and some of them could even make it into production.
This project got me really excited about all the things we could do and that’s why I love these Hack Days so much.
