Particle Photon Pay IOTA to Read Sensors

Background:

I teach robotics, but also try to simplify machine learning and in this case cryptocurrency programming. My self-assigned job is to simplify complex tech for high school age students. I wanted to make a simple example of using IOTA with a Particle Photon. The $19 Photon is like a WiFi-enabled Arduino. I want to make the program easy enough so that it could be a template for high school students to start their own projects with. I also plan to give my students 1,000 IOTA each.

Impact Project:

As an impact project, this project looks towards the sustainable development goal #4 Quality Education! I would love to have some help from the community to improve the efficiency and security of my code design

The Project:

What I have done is build a human to machine financial interaction (Github here). Where the human requests a sensor reading by the amount of Main Net IOTA they send. The human must manually enter the machines return address taken from a node js website and send as a message the persons return address!

From 1 to 10 tokens has the Photon toggle it's D7 LED. Proof of using the Photon to control an actuator.

Above 10 IOTA tokens requests the data from a photoresistor. Proof of using the Photon as a sensor.

The program runs a website using javascript nodejs, which supplies the new receive address and shows a general table of previous transactions. Showing the first 5 characters of each address, and in the message sent back to the human would be the reply address. Chart also shows how many IOTA were confirmed.

Once students get this example working it would be fairly easy for them to adjust the code flashed to the photon to control or read their own sensors and actuators.

Video and Images:

Below is my video of the code running. I have occasionally stopped the video as we need to wait a few minutes for the live financial IOTA transaction to occur.

Example chart displayed on web page.

Trinity wallet showing the returned Photoresistor raw value.

The basic website information

Next Steps:

Now that I have finished a human to machine program the next step would be an automated machine to machine interaction. This M2M program would once again be made with the idea that it was easy enough that students could use it as a template for further work. This program is not yet ready ( m2m server, m2m client) and I would love to have help from the IOTA community to develop it more.

Request:

P.S. It would be great if the IOTA Foundation made a method to give Main Net IOTA to interested High School computer programming students. You can't do any Main Net programming without IOTA but even the small amount of 1000 IOTA would allow them to test real code! Students code send code between themselves and even between their own accounts (seeds). From a teaching of teenagers point of view Dev Net is just not impressive enough.