Embed<IOTA> update II

By Archive Last updated Mar 5, 2024

This is the 2nd update about ongoing progress of running a IOTA Wallet on IoT devices. Please find the general vision and project description linked here: Embed<IOTA> and first part here: Embed<IOTA> update I.

Previous update described some tinkering with different MCU boards to achieve basically attaching MCU signed zero value transactions to Tangle.

Figure 1. Basic workflow described in update I where it was achieved to bring zero value transactions to Tangle signed by ESP8266 and ESP32 via WiFi.

For any serious application it wouldn’t be acceptable to fire and forget transactions. DLT’s bring the benefit of immutable data/information storage, so it’s essential to get the data back at some point. For instance if you store any sensor values in Tangle, other MCU’s should have a chance to find this data and use it. Another issue comes with value transactions, where any IoT device should have the chance to check if its own or other transaction is confirmed. So today, lets start taking this chance…

Basically there are multiple ways finding transactions on Tangle. You can try it with any Tangle explorer. You can find transactions by knowing the address, transaction hash, bundle hash or tag. Depending on use case some of this methods make more or less sense to use. But as a first step we don’t care about particular use cases cause the general implementation is same for all — it just need some use case dependent adjustment, we come back to it at later point.

Figure 2. Basic workflow of attaching bundles to tangle and try to find them at a later point in time to receive its information.

For a simple test the most obvious approach was chosen. Only two API methods are necessary to get the transaction info back: findTranaction() and getTrytes().