AirPower

A cloud- and IoT-based energy meter solution for power companies that aims for accountable and sustainable electricity use by thwarting electricity theft, meter tampering, and power line manipulation.

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Inspiration

According to an article from NDTV, India's Power companies lose more than Rs. 55,000 Crore every year due to electricity theft, meter tampering, power line manipulation and various other factors.

How it works

AirPower is a collection of complete end-to-end services, based on top of an IoT device.

The IOT device can be installed in residences as a replacement for existing energy meters.

We offer mainly two platforms for our services around the device, a web-based admin dashboard and a flutter based companion app for consumers.

We're using an ACS712 Sensor, along with an Arduino ESP8266, using which the input power readings are measured and uploaded to firebase.

Features

Powerful dashboard An incredibly powerful & intuitive dashboard, for seamless integration between all the services.

Complaints Tracker Keep on track with all the issues, that your consumers are facing, in a powerful yet simple way.

Theft Detection Stay on track with all the issues, that your consumers are facing, in a powerful yet simple way.

Map Clusters Realtime updates that can pan across a whole city, state or even a continent, helping you detect power fluctuations, outrage etc. Perfect Companion Provide an immersive experience to your consumers, with our companion app.

AirPower is a collection of complete end-to-end services, based on top of an IoT device. The IoT device can be installed in residences as a replacement for existing energy meters.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Meter Tampering As tampering with home meters is not legally allowed, we had to come up with some workarounds, such as using a home appliance (A 7W electric bulb in our case) and measure its power for demonstration purposes.

Uploading data to the cloud As of today, The first-party firebase library for Arduino only supports realtime database, there is no support for Cloud Firestore as of now, which is used by our web app and flutter app, finding a work around for this was quite challenging, we brainstormed together for hours on StackOverflow, Arduino community, until we finally came up with a workaround to create a REST API that receives the device readings in a POST request and updates those in cloud firestore.

GSAP Coming to the website, The landing page of our website heavily relies on GSAP, which I had never used before this hackathon. I'm proud to say in these 48 hours, I was able to grasp the essentials of GSAP on my fingertips and that's something I can add to my list of skills.

What we learned

As mentioned previously, before we started this project, neither of us knew how to work with GSAP, and it was difficult to follow along with their official documentation, but we're proud that after hours of searching on stackoverflow, tutorials on youtube, codepen samples, medium articles and other blogs, we were finally able to figure stuff out

What's next for AirPower

There are a few things we're planning right now for the future of this :

  1. Making an api for integration with google assistant, alexa etc.
  2. Adding support for sub-phase connections and aggregating their data.

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