ColdBlocks : The Idea

Karthik Menon — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 09:18:00 +0000

“An early beginning paves a path for planning and preparedness.” ~ Thomas Nathaniel

The final year engineering undergraduate degree requires the student to create a working model of his/her own, individually or as a part of a team. For me, it was a no brainer. I have always enjoyed working in a team environment and my teammates were close to me at various levels. They weren’t just friends. They were my brothers.

We began around mid July of 2019 with multiple brainstorming sessions as to what persistent issue should be focused on through our project. We had a nice time bonding with each other and the ideas being shared were vastly diverse. After a few meetings, we all had come to a consensus to tackle the problem faced by the Cold Chain Networks and the lack of Quality Assurance (QA) for the customers during the transportation phase. Without a proper vision of the product and purely based on our premature idea, we registered for a competition called TCS Enginx and during the course of next five months, we were able to emerge as one of the top 125 teams from all over the country. We knew that the project at hand was not an easy one to implement but we backed our guts. Based on our industry research, we knew that our product had a huge market to satisfy and we were convinced of our abilities and strengths.

We drew a wireframe design to establish the expected outcome alongside the UI Screen Design. The initial step was to modularise the whole project so as to implement a bottoms-up approach. Denil and Kevin took over the IoT, Testing and Documentation side of things, Jim took care of the front end and I enjoyed my end with BlockChain, BackEnd and integration. Once we had decided on the split-up, we went through some massive open online course(MOOC) pertaining to our area of operation.

And thus began a journey with loads of laughs, tears, arguments, fun, sleepless nights, feuds and hugs but above all, one that imparted a huge learning experience.

Fast Forward to our GitHub Repo

ColdBlocks - Promising a Secure Cold Chain Network

Karthik Menon — Wed, 20 May 2020 05:46:23 +0000

ColdBlocks - Promising a secure Cold Chain Network

Cold Chain Logistics company lack the an organised system for Quality Assurance and Tracking which provides real time data availability and end-to-end data transparency. A lack of Quality Assurance during transportation from Customer’s point of view is a major hurdle that engulfs the cold chain network and its absence has largely been ignored by the organizations.

For ColdBlocks we used Hyperledger Composer & Fabric to build our blockchain, nodeJS as our back end server, reactJS for our front end PWA with Twilio WhatsApp integration.
We have deployed our front end web application on Netlify.

Link to Code

The project can be found at - {https://github.com/mojojojo20/coldblocks}

This was the first time that we as a team were building a project from scratch. Most of us had no idea about how it will end up. However, through some months of MOOC courses and E-learning, we were able to prepare for this beforehand.

Our main objective through this project was to provide an end-to-end data transparency and a reliable Quality Assurance channel for end customers who do not have any idea about the quality of a product during transportation.

DEV Community: Karthik Menon

ColdBlocks : The Idea

ColdBlocks - Promising a Secure Cold Chain Network

ColdBlocks - Promising a secure Cold Chain Network

Link to Code