Using Jura code we have developed a Kura’s package to test the efficiency of a device making transactions to the IOTA’s tangle.

These days we are using the starter kit that we got for our proposal for the Eclipse Open IoT Challenge 4.0 to carry out different tests. With the kit we got three Raspberry Pi 3 and one Up Squared* Grove* IoT Development Kit. All this costs about 400$, a great reward.

In our proposal, we use IOTA to store information, being the search for the nonce for the proof of work in each IOTA’s transaction the most computationally expensive part. You can send everything you want to the Tangle without spending IOTAs, but unless you have free electricity, the transaction will not be free. However, what worries us is not the marginal cost of electric power, but the ratio of transactions we can achieve using low-cost single board computers.

We have decided to carry out some experiments and we share the results with you. We have proceeded as follows.

We have the following hardware:

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

UP Squared.

1 Micro SD Class 10 32GB.

1 Micro SD Class 10 16GB.

1 Micro SD Class 4 8GB.

Using this hardware we have prepared four configurations:

UP Squared. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B + Micro SD Class 10 16 GB. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B + Micro SD Class 4 8GB. Raspberry Pi 2 Model B + Micro SD Class 10 32 GB.

For all configurations we have installed the latest version of Kura (‘Raspbian (Model 2 or 3, No Net)’ for UP Squared).

Using Jura code we have developed a Kura’s package to test the efficiency of a device making transactions to the IOTA’s tangle. You can download the code here. If you want to try it, we warn you that (in our case) the latest version of Kura’s web does not show the service’s configuration menu the first time we deploy it. The solution is simple, install, uninstall and reinstall…

We have sent in each experiment 50 transactions to the following addresses:

And the results are:

UP Squared: 31.17 seconds each transaction (115.51 per hour) Pi 3 Model B + SD Class 10: 103.25 seconds each transaction (34.87 per hour) Pi 2 Model B + SD Class 10: 154.4 seconds each transaction (23.32 per hour) Pi 3 Model B + SD Class 4: 196.52 seconds each transaction (18.32 per hour)

Obviously, the result after 50 transactions using a Kura’s package should never be used as a measure of the efficiency of the device, but it allows us to intuit the approximate performance of each one.