Inspiration

I was heading off on vacation and needed a way to toggle my chicken coop door remotely while away. The blockchain provides the perfect backend for such a project!

What it does

You can interact with a smart contract deployed to the Fantom Opera Mainnet to toggle the status of a door open or closed. A separate application listens for a state change on this contract and in turn transmits a wireless signal to a remote chicken coop door to open or close.

How I built it

I built the back end application with Solidity. The front end is comprised of two React.js applications. The arduino modules are pre-loaded with C++ code I wrote to check for serial signaling and also parsing the data from a wireless transmission.

Challenges I ran into

The application behaved differently on the test net vs. the Mainnet. In the end, I could not rely on purely event emitter signals from the Solidity contract to get this thing to work. This took some problem solving and I resolved the issue by having my application read the status of the smart contracts on the back end periodically and then check for changes.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is my first application deployed to the Fantom Blockchain and it is the first blockchain operated chicken coop door in the world.

What I learned

I learned a great deal about the affordances of the Fantom blockchain (speed, transaction costs) and also how to deal with long distance wireless signaling between hardware devices.

What's next for Blockchain Chicken Coop Door

I'm hoping to pursue a patent with my idea as the world of poultry is in need of a revolution!

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