Happy BauHaus Cat

Be informed of the latest MolochDAO and Cryptokitty news in a friendly way, with true full-colour out of band communication for true decentralization.

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Inspiration

Different sculptures that communicate with light and the idea that decentralization could use some proper decentral comms channel.

Videos: https://vimeo.com/355795342 https://vimeo.com/355795359

What it does

It informs you of the latest CryptoKitty and molochDAO news in a friendly and truely decentralized way, with true full-colour out-of-band communication. It queries the last new molochDAO member and displays id, shares, isActive and didRageQuit, as well as the latest CryptoKitty and displays id, owner and birthtime.

How I built it

Hardware

  • Lucky cat with RGB Led eyes and esp8266
  • Simple RGB LEDs

Software

  • Written in Micropython
  • Using PWM to drive the LEDs into different colours
  • Getting graphql data from thegraph and then morsing that data. For that, each string is barsed character by character. This runs in an endless loop.

Challenges I ran into

  • Deciding if this was too small a project to do
  • Mmmh, should I actually try if soldering in the hackathon venue sets of the smoke alarm... or not.
  • There was no 2.4 Ghz Wifi
  • Does a graphql client fit into micropython?

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Incoporated the BauHaus spirit
  • Actually made the code more useable and easily extendable
  • Have ample opportunity for further hacking, though most of that requires hardware mods for which I didn't bring all the tools.

What I learned

  • Even light clients are big, and need a lot of RAM
  • Decide early what you want to do :)
  • 2.4 Ghz Wifi is important
  • 36 hours are long and short at the same time. So maybe this is also Schrödinger's cat.

What's next for Happy BauHaus Cat

  • Achieve true bidirectional communication through pairing with a 2nd cat or/and requisite iOS/Android apps that decode the data stream
  • Potentially add speaker for morse code sounds and/or Nyancat sound
  • Add OLED for QR-code (probably in the base, as there is not really a space to put it on the cat
  • maybe a true client once the Elk board (elk.cc) is out

What's not working

  • Arm is currently not moving very well, as I lack the tools to fix it (would need to solder)
  • At the moment, the graphql data is only loaded at the beginning, as when reloading it every time or with a timer the board resets at the moment, and I didn't have any time anymore to figure out why.

Built With

  • esp8266
  • graphql
  • led
  • micropython
  • rgb
  • thegraph
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