2018-11-06 • 7 min read

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How many times have you forgotten to switch off the parking payment app? Does it always happen in the most expensive zone? Do you get annoyed every time you have to download another app to pay for parking in a new city?

Forget these inconveniences, as well as all the obstacles you’ve ever encountered when paying for toll roads or even EV charging.

Enjoy the carVertical approach to the Internet of Things.

Today carVertical vin decoder presents carVertical.CITY, a platform which will step by step bring the long awaited IoT benefits from futuristic articles to the real life, starting with a global unified solution for automatic car parking.

“We’ve created a cute combination of OBD (on-board diagnostics) features, GPS tracking and IOTA Tangle possibilities. Everything is packed and served in a single user-friendly carVertical.CITY app which accepts payments in cV tokens,” summarises carVertical CTO Audrius Kučinskas.

No more overpayments

After successfully completing carVertical ICO in January, we dedicated a separate team to work on vehicles IoT solutions. Now we’re already presenting an app which someday should become an irreplaceable tool for millions of drivers around the globe.

carVertical.CITY automatically starts counting time when you park a car in the paid zone. What is even more important, it automatically stops the timer when you drive away, so you don’t waste a penny.

A driver needs only to install carVertical OBD device in the car and download carVertical.CITY app. All the hard work is done by the carVertical team, contributing with IOTA distributed ledger and GPSWOX, provider of global GPS tracking solutions.

An OBD device tracks your car and processes data to the IOTA Tangle. When your vehicle is riding, it’s being constantly checked via GPS. Coordinates, engine status and battery level is stored as an IOTA transaction.

If the vehicle stops in the paid parking zone, carVertical.CITY automatically records parking start time and price in the zone. When you drive away, an app autonomously makes a new IOTA transaction pointing that your parking is finished and defining the services cost.

Paying in cV tokens

carVertical.CITY app users are able to real-time monitor their cars on the map, so you can always feel safe knowing your vehicle is in the same place you left it.

Driver gets notifications if parking status changes (car starts or stops parking itself).

The primary payment method is CV token.

User can also take a look at a parking history. Moreover, app allows to switch parking on or off remotely.

“The primary payment method in carVertical.CITY app is CV token. But we’ve also added support for MIOTA cryptocurrency as IOTA is a backbone of our IoT infrastructure,” points out A. Kučinskas.

The system in details: how does the magic happen?

Now demonstrated platform was mainly tested with already existing hardware. Simultaneously, we’ve also developed our own OBD device. However, our goal is to make carVertical.CITY compatible with every OBD device in the world.

“Teltonika OBD reader is installed in our demo car which you can see in the video above. It constantly transfers data to the GPSWOX server. According to the certain triggers (e.g. battery level or engine status), carVertical team gets data from GPSWOX software in form of events," describes carVertical IoT engineer Nerijus Misius.

Events are then fed into parking controller, which in turn makes decisions whether the vehicle parking state changes. The state of vehicle parking is transmitted to IOTA.

As we are on the road to full decentralisation, we are building our own device. As a prototype we used Freematics ONE reader from Australia. It was connected with Raspberry Pi Zero single board computer. The two communicate via node.js serial library. So Raspberry can read the car speed, engine speed and battery status. It was also connected to a 3G modem to establish an internet connection.

Raspberry processes the received information and sends the request to our parking controller, which controls the parking state on IOTA.

"Raspberry receives information from our server and takes the call back. If the parking is started, system goes to a sleep mode. If the parking is stopped, system is pending until the next car stop," explains N.Misius.

Our ultimate goal is to have a device that controls and sends transactions directly to IOTA, which in turn would remove all the centralised steps we currently have to implement.

The touch of IOTA

No matter which hardware type is used, parking status is always being checked according to the latest IOTA Tangle transaction. Depending on whether the information parking timer is being started or stopped. When parking is finished, server makes a final transaction which contains GPS location, start and end time, duration and parking price.

carVertical.CITY app communicates directly with IOTA, checks the transaction and provides users with the latest information. As well as that, users may force the change of state in IOTA from the app. This way IOTA Tangle works as a single source of truth for the vehicles parking state.

Why IOTA? Because IOTA was made for the devices like our OBDs. IOTA Tangle lets check any car’s parking status anytime. Moreover, it’s very easy to join for the new market players: only their IOTA address is needed.

One world – one app

Drivers have been dreaming about an automatic parking payment app for ages. But carVertical.CITY will give you much more.

Almost every time you visit a new city and want to pay for a parking ticket, you spend an eternity to find and download an app for the unpleasant act of giving your cash away.

carVertical has finally created a unified solution which potentially could work all over the world. The platform is perfectly suited for both public and private parking lots.

A solution potentially could work all over the world.

“Every parking provider is welcome to our service”, invites N. Misius. “It’s easy to join, because you don’t need to build your own infrastructure. It’s enough to provide us the map of your parking lots and IOTA address.”

carVertical.CITY is already available to use in municipal parking zones of Vilnius, the Capital of Lithuania. But that’s just a beginning. Someday you might use the same app and same cV tokens or MIOTA to pay parking tickets from the streets of New York to Tokyo suburbs.

For everything that has GPS coordinates

If parking payment becomes automatic and unified, then why wouldn’t other driver duties follow?

"In the future carVertical.CITY platform could potentially allow you to pay for everything that has GPS coordinates: not only public and private parking lots, but also toll roads, city congestion fees, etc.," lists A. Kučinskas.

Among other upcoming app features, carVertical IoT team is now even discussing about a unified payment for EV charging.

EV charging payment is simply less complained about today, because relatively few people are using it. However, as electric cars will sooner or later occupy the roads, drivers will face the chaos in charging stations. Different providers demand different accounts, which sometimes can take several days to get verified. A pleasant weekend trip can get really complicated… Therefore, a unified paying for EV charging could be one of the carVertical.CITY features. So users should finally be able to pay via single app everywhere they drive.

It seems, cV token will gain a much wider circulation soon. But every journey starts with a small step. Take the first one. Download carVertical.CITY app which soon will be available on AppStore and Google Play.