Talking about IoT and blockchain in Kuala Lumpur

In October we presented a one-day workshop based on the internet of things (IoT) and blockchain technology. These are two complementary technologies, both part of the collection of technologies known as the fourth industrial revolution or IR4.0, that have become ubiquitous in recent years.

The workshop took place at the Institute of Visual Informatics (IVI) at UKM's campus in Bangi, near Kuala Lumpur. This was a kind of experiment for us- we wanted to gauge whether there would be a demand for this kind of one-day focused event where we would take a topic and give people an overview of the principles and hopefully inspire people to investigate further how they could be used in their own projects.

We always try to include as much hands-on work as possible in all our courses, and on this day we got our delegates to build an end-to-end example of an IoT system that integrates with a blockchain.

Taking some inspiration from white papers and articles on this exact subject (such as this one from Deloitte), and taking a use case from my own background in software engineering, we built a system that logged data from an RFID reader connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller, sent it to a gateway and then to an API running in the cloud, which added each transaction onto a home-made blockchain. All developed in Python, the language of the Internet of Things.

To demonstrate more complete blockchain functionality, our colleague Roslan joined us and presented an example using the Internet Computer blockchain, which can seamlessly integrate with other applications (including Python applications amongst other things).

As this was a pilot, this was a bit of a learning exercise for us as well as our delegates, but I think the answer to the question- is there a demand for this type of workshop?- is yes. We are now brainstorming a series of similar sessions, on a variety of topics, probably in the new year.

The picture below shows work in progress- two of the RFID readers we used, with the microcontroller, connected to the gateway (a Raspberry Pi), which is then linked to the cloud.