Where to start - Arduino Project & Stellar

Bastop

Hi everyone,

Having followed Stellar for a long time, I have decided to drastically change/develop my career path - on a personal level first. I am working as a project manager on the planing side of renewable energy projects. As I can see in my career how important it is to really understand the blockchain technology to come up with creative solutions in the energy sector in the future, I have decided to creating some private projects first using blockchain and Apps/Dapps.

I have programmed some arduino projects recently and learned Visual C , about 8 years ago (hardly remembering much). Also my background is really not programming but rather GIS/Geography. Also I have never developed an app on my phone, I have never programmed java or any other program language, But there is some potential and i am willing to learn.

Let's say I would like to build a personal app on my phone that turns on the electric charger of my VW/T4 BUS once I make a sufficient payment on the stellar blockchain (or somthing like that) What literature/online material/software/App development tools/etc./websites would you recommend to get there on my own?

Imagine you had no idea/no background in programming and you want somebody to give you all the necessary signposts of how to get this done. Yea, that's me!

Now what I am looking for is some helpful advice on literature/online material/software/App development tools/etc./websites and maybe also people to stay in contact with in keybase! Who is out there? Would love to hear back. Many thanks!

Torkus

Hey, welcome to the gang, that sounds really interesting and I'll give you a helping hand, no need to be an expert programmer but definitely you need to know some basic stuff. The Stellar docs are top notch and easy to digest, they cover a variety of languages and I guarantee you'll be up and running in no time.

First, have a detailed plan of what exactly you want to do, there may be some things that you can't disclose or things that will change in the future for sure, but if you want to perform some actions on certain events I guess a listener for payments is all you need or perhaps fetching the balance every hour if you don't want an open connection all the time.

Once you get the signal from that event then do your magic to turn that switch on.

All the docs are here: https://www.stellar.org/developers/
SDKs here: https://www.stellar.org/developers/reference/
Ask questions in this forum or in StackExchange: https://stellar.stackexchange.com

For the listener, here: https://www.stellar.org/developers/js-stellar-sdk/reference/examples.html#streaming-payment-events

For getting the balances at the end of the page: https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/get-started/create-account.html

That's all Javascript but easily portable to any language.

HTH

Torkus

First of all, go ahead and create a test account and fund it with some play money (copy the public key in the friendbot textbox and get 10,000 XLM):

https://www.stellar.org/laboratory/#account-creator?network=test

Save your public and secret key, you'll need them in the code for certain things like checking the balance and once you've tested the code you can get a live account.

Torkus

Getting an account may sound stupidly simple but let me tell you a story, I wanted to know what was all the noise behind the Tezos rise and went to look for SDKs and basic stuff on how to create an account and wanna know what? After hours of searching I couldn't find a damn page explaining that simple first step in any crypto currency, creating an account.

So even if you know how to do that, there must be someone somewhere as lost as myself trying to get started on some new tech and that stupidly simple step is all you need to get going.

HTH