Eco and User-Friendly Minting Station

Hi everyone from Peercoin community,

I’m reaching out to seek for advices. I’m actually working on a new minting station, but I would need your help in the process. I started iterating some prototypes. I know Peerbox project already, that’s a good starting point … but come on! Not everyone is a developer/technical out there, it’s quite complicated to set it up and you don’t even know how it is working. Minting process is quite obscure and people doesn’t seems to realize potential over there.
It got me a lot of time figuring it out and I’m still learning everyday which is great but people need to understand it right away to use it, not only tech.

The idea would be to have a minting station that indicate minting process in a friendly way using lights and/or sound. Of course, it can serve other purposes like bringing awareness to cryptocurrency for people (Using a startup wizard for example). I heard people are working on new educational videos about Peercoin that can be included in the experience as well.

Incentive it quite obvious as a minting station will help you earn PPC but can be converted as US dollar or whatever fiat currency you’re using. Minting process should be the main feature of the device. Securing the network would come as a second argument.

Technically it is not complicated as it will take the same architecture as the Peerbox project. Using a Raspberry Pi Zero (low consumption usage) to host the Peercoin minting wallet. Cover box will be improved with leds and 3D printing parts to make it friendly. Minting station can be staked on the wall so you can see your minting status in real time.

I really believe in Peercoin project, it’s a wonderful project with great people around it. I also feel like Peercoin is worth working for and that everyone can be involved in the process that’s why I would need everyone feedback/opinions/comments about this.

Thanks a lot for reading,

Sincerely.


Follow-up links
Hackaday.io page : Peercoin Minting Station | Hackaday.io
Wallet Design : https://i.redd.it/hl2le9vio4201.png


Fusion360 design
v1
v2

Web Wallet Splashscreen
v1


Design Ideas
bucckets


Implementation

Peercoin web wallet connected to hardware RaspberryPI : GitHub


Update on design 07/03/2021 : It better to have a cleaner look with lights behind it

3 Likes

There is StakeBox, which is ready out of the box and less technical, if this is what you had in mind.

Team Update #13: The Peercoin Team Partners with StakeBox (A Pi Supply Brand) to Deliver a Secure StakeBox for Minting Peercoins. Pre-Order Today!

Hi Cisco,

Yes this is a starting point but I would like to improve it to make it user friendly. I will start modeling something and share it here.
I’m talking about this tutorial : https://www.stakebox.org/blogs/learn/getting-started-with-peercoin-stakebox.
It’s great but still too technical for average people. Goal is to be able to get as much people involved right ? So it needs to be easier than that in my opinion, what do you think ?

Regards,

1 Like

have you heard about alpine linux? i think it is a good fit for something like this

So I had an idea for this. I made a prototype for a neon type sign that could be made out of plastic with LEDs behind it. I want to add a raspberry pi and power both the lights and the board from a dual USB connection or something. But basically, the leaf would also indicate the color of the maturity of a given stake. Maybe if you made a pi enclosure with a smaller leaf, you could do something similar. Really easy to just make two or three leds that indicate the highest priority stake’s age or something.

For scale, its about the length of my forearm in size. Could be made much smaller and more like a nightlight with the raspberry pi included.

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Hi Bucckets,

Thanks for sharing, that’s pretty interresting indeed. Green leds looks nice as well. Smaller size + nightlight is great I guess. Clock-based is also something to look at.

Hi,

Quick follow up, I’ve created an hackaday.io project page so everyone can contribute here or on the forums. I’m preparing each unit tasks for people so anyone can take what they would like to work on (Maybe using Trello, or if you have better tools for communities you can suggest).

@Buckkets I took you’re lighting leaf to illustrate on the hackaday.io page.

Stay tuned for more, I will plan to design leaf box with some NeoPixel in it, will see how it render (I’ll go for clock-wise format with lighting indicating minting days)

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Update for rendering. It’s more difficult than I though to make a proper design. Gonna see what’s come next!

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Looks great! Excited to see how it looks. Rounded edges are always difficult, well done!

I like the minimal look. Just so you realize though, you are currently using an outdated version of our leaf logo. It looks similar, but there is a difference. The most up to date version can be found on our website here: https://peercoin.net/resources.html#graphics

By the way, where did you find the outdated image? It seems new services that support us always use the outdated graphic, so I’m trying to find out where they’re getting it from, since we don’t display it on our websites anymore.

Hi Sentinelrv,

Yeah you’re right I got it from https://worldvectorlogo.com/downloaded/peercoin-ppc with a google search. I’ll just downloaded the right ones to be imported into the design. Thanks for pointing out.

Update to this thread started a while already.

I just pushed a starting point of a web wallet connected to peercoind raspberry pi. I didn’t test it out fully with a new hardward setup from scratch.
User can see real time minting attempts and minting progress like in the full desktop wallet, except that you can just plug your raspberry pi that will act as hardware wallet.

  • Javascript API for Peercoin RPC commands needs to be improved an exported as an external one to be used anywhere else (others javascript framework for example like VueJS or standard JS)

Features include :

  • Real Time Minting attempts
  • wallet transactions
  • blockchain sync using RPC JSON Interface

It act as an head for the headless raspberry pi hardware using peercoind. Connexion can be done to localhost RPI using internal IP and port 9902. For now if you want to test it you need to push and built this repo on your RPI and start web server then connect with any device(s).

Needs to be done : Design from the Light wallet reference from changelog.md (or something similar)


Well it looks a lot like Ledger, gonna see for others design later on it’s just a Proof-Of-Concept.

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Been busy for a while but there an update on design 07/03/2021

Actually making stuff on testnet to get faster mints

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Some brand new wallet UI for future hardware wallet.
Here’s some preview using testnet network. If some folks don’t know you need to wait approximatively 18 days to get your first mint on testnet because maturing time is 1 days + around 17 days for medium size transactions.
I’m thinking of adding some useful links in the menu for people to learn more about sustainable blockchains from Peercoin University + some apps made by the community ( Peercoin.Party for example which is great! )

Note: Video is “hosted” on a decentralized service called LBRY if you don’t know ( web version’s called odysee )

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I’ve decided to go on for the name Peercoin Mintalia or Mintalia.
Here’s a snapshot where user can know more about sustainable blockchain like Peercoin linked to some community members app’s or websites URL’s. App is written in ReactJS I think an alpha release will be coming up in the next few months.

Introducing Hashrate / Maximum with real time minting attempts I think it’s great to show that device is currently minting otherwise user think nothing happens

  • Attempts : All attempts to mint a block ever occuring since you’re actually minting
  • Hashrate: How many minting attempts occuring per seconds
  • Maximum : Maximum hashrate you can get based on your current holdings and maturing coins

Screen Shot 2021-04-13 at 11.23.24 PM

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Just updated the repository because the old was removed due to inactivity.
I’ve added a documentation about the future software that will run on Peercoin PI. Stay tuned.

Here’s the new one: Peercoin PI GitHub

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Update(s) on the documentation GitHub - mperkins707/peercoinpi at develop

  • Added the view from the dashboard with an overview of the transactions and the possibility to switch between testnet and mainet mode with an header indicating the mode
  • Added My Mints view with the current minting and attempts (WIP)
  • Show when the device will be ready to mint from the current transactions in the wallet

Feedbacks are welcome

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