 Hello, everyone. Welcome to my talk. My name is Nicholas Lopez, and I'll be giving a lightning talk called a weather balloon example to authenticate data. Me in a nutshell, I'm a software engineer. I have a weather background from Fortis State University, and I'm an early career scientist and programmer. I've worked at Noah Boeing and NASA on a weather satellite for that last part for NASA. You can see Go 16 off on the right. I'm an interdisciplinary tinker and researcher. I'm the kind of guy that will work on a high frequency trading bot, and then quickly delve into a weather balloon project, which I'll be talking about today. So my small company is called the telecondor remote sensing group. We launch radio sands, also known as weather balloons to make 12 hour forecasts. We launched them once a week out of Uyo, Nigeria. These kinds of forecasts warn populations about severe weather and flash floods. We also use the data to make forecasts for drones that are highly dependent on rain and wind at the boundary layer. So you can imagine a drone delivering medical supplies or possibly prescription medication to a remote area during COVID-19. Our company is trying to forecast a city-wide local forecast for those drones. And all of this is made possible with open source. So West Africa has a great connectivity with 3G and 4G cellular networks. The population is extremely young and incredible. They're very talented electrical and electrical engineers and they have a lot of web development talent. We use these little container boxes that a friend of mine actually provided. They're 3D printed with open CAD files and they work with an open Lora Wanstack known as the things network. We actually work with a blockchain called ESIO and that's that's the name of the source code and the actual blockchain name is Telos. We work with Node Red, which is built on Node.js. And I believe was once part of the open JS foundation. And we use open IoT firmware and open hardware. So I've done very little work to get this accomplished, but we've been able to successfully have four flights out of UYO and collect data up to 196 millibars, which if there's any atmospheric scientists in the room or any even pilots. That's about 39,000 feet. So it gets it's gets pretty high up there and it reaches the top of the troposphere and into the stratosphere. Um, so we we encountered this challenge of being able to authenticate if the actual launcher of the balloon was also the person that was the person. They were the actual miner themselves. So we're providing digital currency for doing this. And we want to make sure that someone isn't lying and saying that they launched a balloon when they didn't. So we needed to have a two factor authentication mechanism to do this. Our, we had limited options seeing as I'm in the United States and we're working in Nigeria. So, you know, the first things that come to mind are SMS texts, but those are very expensive internationally. A lot of roaming calls email and Google Authenticator actually operate terrible user experience. I'm sure a lot of people have seen that when they have to go into a website and have to switch back into their Google Authenticator app. They copy the code and then bring it back to the original application. Um, we also had the unique struggle of having to have our IOT back end be different from our Web application back end. They're actually owned by different companies and we want to make them platform agnostic. And so we had to seek unique solutions to this problem. So one of the things we we developed since we're already using a blockchain to provide the data onto onto the tele-smart contract is provide a specific contract that requires two approvals within 30 seconds. Um, so the IOT back end or the Node-RED server and the web app server have to communicate. And if they don't within 30 seconds, then the verification fails. So, this sounds really complicated, but in an application, it's actually extremely easy to use. If anyone's use MetaMask or any of the blockchain tools that are pretty popular with Ethereum or any other smart contract platform, it's as simple as a Chrome extension that you can use to sign transactions using your private key. And this is exactly what we use. So public blockchains are free to use, which is great. And of course that that user experience is absolutely incredible. And we just happened to stumble across this as we were going along. So thank you so much for my talk, listening to my talk. If you want to learn more about the project you can visit us at condo weather.org. You can follow me on my Telegram and GitHub or SunburnCats. You can follow me on Twitter, and of course my email condo weather at gmail.com. We'll send that to my personal email and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you so much for listening to my talk. I hope you got a sense of what we're working on and you can see how open source is solving some pretty great things. You know, we're getting devices smaller and smaller, and the networks are getting more and more complicated, but we're solving bigger and bigger problems. So it's pretty great. Thank you so much.