My name is Zixuan Zeng, a CS student from Zhejiang University. This summer, I was happy to join the Hyperledger Internship Program and had a very fulfilling experience. I was fortunate to work with my mentor Adam Burdett from the Sovrin Foundation on a project focused on building a Raspberry Pi Indy agent on Raspberry Pi.This project’s goals was to develop a Hyperledger Indy agent running on Raspberry pi, producing a customized Raspbian image that provides easy access to GPIO pins, enabling it to interact with external sensors, LED matrix, etc. With the new Hyperledger Aries project, our implementation was an Aries-cloud-agent (previously indy-catalyst) that can interact with Indy pool and create more interesting applications. This project also includes an Aries RFC defining the message format for interactions with Sense-Hat extension board as well as its messaging module implementation.
What I learned:
- Open source community work style: Through this summer’s internship, I experienced the working style of open-source development from the Hyperledger community. For example, I opened a GitHub issue and got it resolved.
- Blockchain knowledge: In this internship, I got to know more about not only the basic blockchain concept but its exciting applications in the future. I learned distributed ledger, zero-knowledge proof and decentralized identifiers during this summer. Additionally, I had the opportunity to set up and test blockchains myself.
- Programming experience on IoT devices: I also gained hands-on programming experience on Raspberry Pi. Since it has ARM architecture, even compiling the SDK was a tough task for me at first. After many tries and looking up the documents, I finally made it on Raspberry Pi. Using Python to control an external GPIO port was also a fun and new experience to me.
- Implementation of a working Hyperledger Indy agent: Working with Aries Cloud Agent, I developed messaging protocols and successfully implemented a working agent. Walking through the architecture of the agent project was really a learning experience for me. I felt very accomplished when I understood the structure of the whole project and developed sub-module based on that.
What comes next:
The next step for this project could be:
- Extend to other IoT devices
- Add support for more add-on boards
- Add support for more messaging types
After this fulfilling experience, I determined that my plan is to become a software engineer, especially in blockchain area. I am happy to join the Hyperledger family and hope I can make more contributions to this vibrant community in the future.
Below are some screenshots from my project. To read my full report, go here.
