SolarOracle | Devpost

Inspiration

We joined another hackathon about electricity markets in the end of October, in which we built a blockchain platform to trade energy supplies, in Algorand. However, we found that the main issue is not trading electricity (which currently is not possibly due to legal issues), but verifying the output of solar panels and integrating this in the blockchain. Our work for the Chainlink hackathon is also about solar power but from a different perspective and using different technologies compared to our previous work; we did not reuse any code.

What it does

Our system consists of a website, an API server and a hardware device. The hardware device measures the electricity output of a solar panel; then it sends the panel secret key and the aggregated output to our API server. The API server verifies the panel secret and stores the output. The website connects to Metamask to login the user, who can prepay for electricity to a smart contract. The smart contract is connected to our API server with a Chainlink oracle, and can use Chainlink keeper to execute every month. Accordingly to the oracle, the smart contract deducts the electricity fee and sends it to our account (or of another electricity provider).

How we built it

We use Moralis and Chainlink for our website, with React for the frontend; for this we started with the Moralis Ethereum boilerplate. For the API server we used Meteor.js and MongoDB and deployed with with Docker. For the hardware device we built a PCB and used an ESP32 microcontroller and other parts that are popular in the DIY community.

Challenges we ran into

We are not very familiar with blockchain, and in particular we had no previous experience with Solidity programming. This made our work difficult. The examples on the Chainlink and Moralis websites helped us a lot to understand it better. The Youtube videos of Moralis in particular showed well how to use Ethereum tools like ganache.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Deploying a website and smart contracts on the testnet.

What we learned

How to use Chainlink and Moralis; how to use ESP32 and wire a circuit of a solar panel.

What's next for SolarOracle

We are trying to refine our business idea; we would also like to improve our prototype to add missing functionality. In particular we would like to add NFTs in Ethereum as a way to invest in solar power generation. For this we are looking for investors and for grants.