INTRODUCTION TO KANDAWEATHER BLOCK PRODUCERS

Kanda Weather
4 min readJun 27, 2021

--

The Kandaweather block producers on telos blockchain are a team of engineers and entrepreneurs from the Telokanda network.

We have been active on the telos blockchain for a few years (since 2019). The Telos blockchain is a network of developers and computer enthusiasts who see potential governance systems for a decentralized internet where people directly control their money and data. We’re a global set of engineers and community members who wish to build a radiosonde network that would greatly expand our understanding of hurricane formation and Africa's climate. This model can also be applied anywhere around the world.

We launched our block producer node on the telos blockchain on 25th June 2021 (7:45 PM — GMT) to support the telos network and we are also working on launching our node for dStor on telos very soon.

WHAT IS KANDAWEATHER?

Kanda weather official logo

“The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do!” — STEEVE JOBS(1955–2011)

Africa lacks real-time historical data and Kandaweather is here to change that narrative.

The Kanda weather balloon project is the new face for how emerging technologies can create a better and more equitable world. There hasn’t been a big push to launch radiosondes in Africa for decades, but now with the development of 3D printing, cheap microcontrollers, and the Telos blockchain, it’s becoming a reality. These weather data are being stored on telos blockchain which uses the EOSIO codebase and is immutable and can be used for various research purposes.

WHAT IS A KANDA WEATHER BALLOON?

A typical KandaWeather balloon launched by Emmanuel Patrick

Kanda weather balloons are weather balloons being launched with low-cost telemetry instruments(radiosondes) by Africans. These balloons are capable of recording climate data, which will be transmitted through the LoRaWAN communication systems and stored on the Telos blockchain.

OUR MISSION

It is our mission to build an entirely community-owned balloon network. We hope to empower African university students to become local climate change leaders.

“Building a mission and building a business go hand-in-hand”. — Mark Zuckerberg

ABOUT OUR BLOCK PRODUCER NODE

Our nodes are run as 2 virtual servers in the AWS Cape Town region. Latency to this area should not be an issue, but just in case, we are experimenting with non-producing Raspberry Pi p2p nodes to reduce latency to our BP servers in Cape Town.

Kanda Weather Group LLC is incorporated in Kansas City, Missouri. Our company received an investment in 2020 from https://goodblock.io in the form of TLOS tokens worth about $3,000 at the time. These funds are used solely for the Kanda Weather Balloon radiosonde project. We also received funding to support our project from the telos work proposal system. (Telos Decide or Telos WPS)

Voters can trust we will maintain our Telos BP servers to be in good standing, as our weather project relies on them for low latency communication between the student devices. We will strive to maintain Telos’s upstanding nature as a high-throughput blockchain with leading governance.

HOW WE USE TELOS BLOCKCHAIN

We have various accounts on telos blockchain for our various launch stations. currently, we have stations in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroun, and more that would be coming up soon in zimbabwe, SADC, and Kenya. For the city of Uyo Nigeria, some of the raw data can be found here.

Other accounts on telos blockchain which we use to store these data include https://telos.bloks.io/account/wxballoons1t https://telos.bloks.io/account/wxballoons3t and many more as we keep working to develop new prototypes for our radiosondes and our AI weather forecast, models.

We also use telos blockchain to incentivize launches to the miner/launchers. We reward the launches with telos blockchain tokens (TLOS and KANDA at the moment and more in the future)

ABOUT OUR HACKATHON ON TAIKAI

Hackathons are proving grounds for new ideas. They’re especially good tools to stimulate the creative and problem-solving juices of developers. we wanna attract highly talented and problem-solving mindsets to our network.

Learn more about the hackathon by clicking here

OUR TEAM

The team behind Weather Balloons Project is diverse in terms of expertise and spatial distribution. We are grounded in engineering and entrepreneurship in developing IoT applications. Our common competency is building disruptive and decentralized blockchain applications that serve the needs of vulnerable communities. To us, innovation should lead to inclusion and resilience and not exclusion.

Nicolas Lopez — CO-FOUNDER

A former software engineer at Boeing and scientific programmer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, he has worked within the fields of weather and software for most of his career. He envisions a future where emerging markets choose how they want their data to be used to benefit society.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-lopez-31b22b82

Emmanuel Patrick — CO-FOUNDER

Emmanuel is a young man with a background in electrical/electronics engineering, he has a passion for blockchain and gaining knowledge throughout his entrepreneurial pursuits He has been active on the blockchain since January 2017. He is organizing the creation of a social rewards media platform that will benefit the Telokanda Weather Group.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/withempato

OUR COMMUNITIES

Official Website https://kandaweather.org
Official Telegram group: https://t.me/kandaweather
Official Twitter page: https://twitter.com/kandaweather

Since we are a project to benefit the Telokanda network, you can also find us here https://telokanda.com and our cross-chain blogging website https://nitrous.telokanda.com

Telokanda Telegram group: https://t.me/telokanda
Telokanda Twitter page: https://twitter.com/telokanda

--

--