Cryptility

Instantaneous and Demand-Based Utilities Payments

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Inspiration

  • Being disappointed by how our apartment handles paying the electricity bills.

What it does

  • Cryptility allows for the instantaneous and decentralized micro-transactions to pay for utilities.
  • A device senses the power being used by an outlet, and immediately pays for the power from a locally hosted Xpring wallet.
  • A dashboard allows individual users to view metrics about their consumption habits.

How we built it

  • Crytpo-enable IoT device communicates over serial to an Arduino that reads sensors and controls power to devices.
  • Writes to DynamoDB, triggering event-driven Lambdas with application logic.
  • IoT board and AWS communicate with the XRP Ledger using the Xpring Javascript SDK
  • ReactJS frontend displays diagnostics active monitoring of utilities.

Challenges we ran into

  • Dragonboard 410c came with Android installed, and had to install Debian manually.
  • The IoT device had to be highly asynchronous, handling both https requests to different endpoints and communication over USB serial.
  • None of us had worked extensively with AWS prior to this Hackathon.
  • Updating the balance of a crypto wallet on the portal

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built an cryptocurrency enabled IoT outlet that reports power usage.
  • Getting many compatible parts work together (Express server, Arduino, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda, Xpring).

What we learned

  • Embedded operating systems are often difficult to install
  • A majority of the time spend working with AWS is used for configuration.

What's next for Cryptility

  • Interledger compatibility, allowing for users and providers to pay in their currency of choice.
  • Options to allow users that produce energy (i.e. from solar panels) to get paid in real time.
  • Admin portal and automation that allows for energy produces to dynamically set rates.
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