Integrating physical devices with IOTA — Car-IOTA Part 2
The full article was originally published by Hugo Gregersen on Medium. Read the full article here.
Introduction
The 13th part in a series of beginner tutorials on integrating physical devices with the IOTA protocolIntroduction
This is the 13th part in a series of beginner tutorials where we explore integrating physical devices with the IOTA protocol. If you have been following the IOTA project for some time you may have heard about strange ideas such as “cars having there own wallets” or “cars paying for there own services”. While this may sound intangible and futuristic, it’s basically the idea we will be taking on in this tutorial.
The use case
As you may remember, we ended the previous tutorial by pointing out some problems related to the centralized nature of the ALPR approach, where a centralized entity (aka, the hotel-owner) would have to have control over the seeds used when performing the payment transactions. The great thing about this approach is that the car itself does not require any new electronics, (as the infrastructure (parking facility) takes care all the payment transactions). While this might be acceptable for some local use-cases, it would not be very practical if we wanted to implement our parking payment system on a truly decentralized and global scale.
In this tutorial we will try and deal with this problem by simply turning everything up-side down. Instead of having the parking facility manage the payment transaction, the car itself will do all the work. This way the IOTA seed never leaves the car (seed) owner.
Data exchange
The first thing we need to deal with when taking on this problem is that we need some type of data exchange between the infrastructure (parking facility) and the car, so that the car knows what payment address to use when sending the payment transaction. I’m guessing there are multiple wireless data protocols and technologies that could be used for this purpose (radio, blue-tooth, RFID etc.) but I felt they all had some disadvantages that were not optimal for this particular use-case. After puzzling over this problem for a while I decided to go with a simple, yet familiar technology that you probably use every day when sitting in front of your television, namely Infrared communication, or IR for short.