Wow we are getting some feedback already.
Cheers,
-lfloorwalker
Hi everyone,
I want to write a short story about our time in London at the Hackathon last week.
In total I was away for about 80 hours and 34 hours flying and about 40 hours in London.
I want to emphasize that all was paid in SolarCoin. Flights, accommodation and our eating expenses and transport.
online photo sharingThis was the next morning in London after I landed. I managed to transit through Korea from Tokyo and pay all of the train fees on the Wirex card for airport transfers in Tokyo.
In Korea I tried to buy a sandwich at starbucks and they rejected the Mastercard, it worked 2.5 hours earlier in Tokyo. Nothing had changed on the balance as I was tracking it in the APP. On the surface mastercard has the same logo, but underneath there are so many systems and I feel that they are very different in each country. For example in Japan you can enter your pin. In Korea you don't need a pin but just sign. If you sign wrong, it doesn't work. They get you to sign on this digital tablet and it is so difficult to get your signature correct! The resolution isn't fine enough.
Very cold and rainy when I arrived. My umbrella flew away! I was wandering around London looking for a Bitcoin ATM to withdraw fiat cash (for a bit of backup) and I went to three different locations. Location 1 had a network error in their ATM and said that they were fixing it. I went to location 2 and they said the ATM was no longer there. Finally I went to the third location and i couldn't even locate the shop. So no luck getting fiat cash from an ATM.
For the rest of the trip I had to pay on mastercard. And also use my backup Paypal account (not SolarCoin's) so it wasn't entirely successful.
image hosting 10mb limitBreakfast when I still had some cash. It was about 9 pounds for a cup of tea and some cereal. One thing about London is getting inside when it is raining and miserable outside and having a warm cup of tea.
photo hostingWe met up with the team, hacked away in the hotel a bit and then went to the hardware store.
I met Francois and Johann and we walked into the hardware store, bought this wood and then took a black cab to the venue. All very funny really. Especially getting that huge piece of timber into the black cab!
Scalextrix dropped the battery off earlier in the hotel lobby and the hotel said that they were taking care of it. It is a huge 22kg lead-acid battery and without Scalextrix help we would have been a "bit of a tight spot!" The hotel lobby misplaced our battery! After Adam and crew called an Uber and we basically walked behind the hotel reception and told them where to find the battery we were able to finally get all of the equipment down to the Rainmakers Loft.
screenshot softwareA cold and cloudy day in London, near the Rainmakers loft near Tower station.
imgurNow the real build began. We spent about 3 hours building up the system. By the way this was after a few beers down at the pub while we were waiting to get into the event space. We were meant to get into there after 3pm as the BBC were still filming but at 5:40pm and still in the pub I got concerned and we just went down to the loft and asked to get in.
They wanted us out by 8pm! That's basically impossible as there was a lot of wiring to be done.
So we wired away and started getting the nodes turned on etc. Finally by 9pm were at a point that we were happy to come back early at 7:30 am to finish up before 9am when the session began.
photo hostingPretty cool event and open office space in London. Picture taken at 9pm.
how to take a screen shotLunch on the first day with all of the organization crew! Chain-of-things, ElectriCChain and Solcrypto!
Wow this was such a great lunch where finally after months of talking and planning with each other on the internet and virtually we could finally meet!
photo uploaderThe kit turned on at the presentation!
We couldn't get the block count right on the Bitseed node (anyone have some thoughts on that please contact me). But we got communication from the data-logger kWh generation to the Solcrypto cloud platform and then a wrapper to the SolarCoin API. This is still ongoing.
screenshot on pcIt seems that we have started something here! This is the picture of the winners of the conference hackathon ideas. They made a presentation that is going to tap the green energy markets to then crowd-fund solar plants in developing countries. It is very interesting. There were a few other great ideas there too. It seems we may have begun to make a new industry called "blockchain energy."
uploading picturesFlying back to Japan for me, a few of them stayed on longer but I had to rush back.
Overall it was a great project, and this project is still ongoing as we transition to a minimum viable product. At least by November this year!!
Thanks to all who funded on the crowd-raise. There is still some budget left over and we are discussing how to allocate that for future ELCC projects. Please also lend your suggestions!!
Best,
-lfloorwalker