Riggy

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Riggy Hardware Blueprint page 1
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Inspiration

Cryptocurrency is rising in popularity amongst today’s generation. As a new type of virtual currency that is secured by methods of cryptography, it has its positives and negatives. An advantage is that this new virtual currency can be mined. Although not physically mined in a cave, crypto mining, in simple terms, is processing mathematical algorithms that allow for new virtual currency to be created and put in a blockchain of currency. To do this, you have to host a computer enabled with significant GPU power. A portion of the currency created is rewarded to the person hosting their computer or dedicated crypto-mining rig. The disadvantage of crypto-mining, however, is the vast quantity of energy consumption it requires. Cryptocurrency mining currently uses 0.5% of all electricity used globally and seven times Google’s total usage. A massive carbon footprint is left with the high electricity use for a powerful computer that is always on and mining. Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk even took action to address this issue by no longer accepting cryptocurrency as a payment method for Tesla products. With the increasing use of fossil fuels to power these powerful computers, crypto-mining has a cost to our environment. Looking for solutions to this issue, we realized that crypto-mining produces significant levels of heat that need to be dissipated to work optimally. Much like our personal computers have fans to cool it down, crypto-mining rigs require the same. The installation of fans to cool down the mining rig adds to the use of electricity. In addition, a productive mining rig requires a large amount of space to host these powerful computers. With the lack of space and thermal energy created, this is where our idea came in. If we could harness the heat created by crypto-mining rigs, we could harness the thermal energy to provide an alternative energy source for homes.

What it does

Riggy is an innovative project and application to reduce the massive carbon footprint created by crypto-mining rigs. Our approach is to install a Riggy unit outside homes and allow users to sign up on the Riggy website to host a mining rig in their unit. Once they get matched with a miner, the miner will then be given a code to unlock the Riggy Unit, and they can place their mining rig inside. The thermal energy (heat) produced by the mining rig is taken in by a heat vacuum and connects to heat pumps at the side of your home. These heat pumps, which are the large grey metal boxes outside your home, take this thermal energy as a power source to generate hot water and warm the home. This situation is a win-win for the miner and the host because the miner is essentially getting free space to put their mining rig and only has to cover the electricity their rig uses. The host is saving money on their electricity bills. Both of them are contributing to lowering down the eco-footprint of crypto-mining.

How we built it

We built a monitoring client that monitors energy usage and energy saving with our project idea. We used Flask, Python, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and Google Firebase to handle user interactions with our platform efficiently and perform updates to the data as needed. We registered a domain with the free .tech domain provided to us, and we used Heroku to deploy our website. Additionally, we created a blueprint for what the physical hardware of Riggy will consist of.

Challenges we ran into

Building the complete idea we had in mind along with all of its small technical details would have taken too long given the contest's duration, so, as a team, we agreed to reduce some of its complexities and build a simple prototype instead to demonstrate our idea. We managed to complete a prototype that incorporated our core ideas for the project within the time frame of the hackathon. Still, we hope to expand upon our idea and finish the remaining technicalities later on our own time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We had an ambitious idea, and we demoed it successfully. Provided more time, we might have developed an app that could help cut some expenses and environmental damage for individuals. Each team member worked on a different aspect of development efficiently, allowing us to cover a breadth of goals that we could not have individually covered.

What we learned

We learned about the impact of mining rigs and cryptocurrency while researching their energy consumption. The countless operations that a mining rig needs to perform successfully are a significant drain on electricity and lead to massive energy usage, resulting in a lot of electricity going to waste. Our goal was to use the heat generated by the mining rigs (instead of just wasting the heat) efficiently.

Also, we learned how to use Flask and Firebase together efficiently to implement an authentication system. We also learned about Material Design while figuring out how to develop the dashboard for our project.

What's next for Riggy

We plan to take our working prototype and continue to build upon it, incorporating more services such as Twilio and Google Analytics on our website. With Twilio, we can expand our services to send the host and the miners texts regarding how much energy they have saved and inform them about possible electricity outages. Google analytics will help us to further understand our customers’ needs. Additionally, we plan to make the website entirely dynamic for the user’s personalized data. Then, we plan to bring the hardware prototype of Riggy to life by using a 3-D design and printing it out. Then, we plan to find the most efficient way to attach a heat pump to our physical prototype and bring riggy into use on its very first home.