Inspiration

Our team has always been fascinated by Evs (electrical vehicles) and the technology that surrounds them. So, it piqued our interest when we heard the project was about the stations that are used to charge these vehicles.

What it does

Ohana Charging is an iOS app that will help Hawai’i Electric track the status of their electrical charging stations across the islands of Hawai’i. The app displays all information and features on a friendly user interface using the “Station Feed”. Our application analyzes the data coming in from the stations and uses advanced statistical calculations to determine if the station is working, down, or congested. Features Include:

Real-Time status of each station
Displays accurate point of peak energy use
Easy-to-read summaries of the data
Interactive charts and graphs that display the key information
A search engine that can help look up a station by its station ID
Refresh button that updates the data instantly
Turn-by-turn GPS directions to each station using any major map application
Contact feature to get ahold of developers for any reason -User chosen threshold for wait time at a charger to calculate congestion

How we built it

The mobile application was built using Xcode and programmed in Swift. The data was cleaned and parsed into JSON and excel files using various Python scripts. The mathematical calculations to determine the status of the stations were done using the Java files that we produced. Also, we used agile development tools like Pivotal Tracker to monitor the process of development.

Challenges we ran into

We had some problems displaying the correct information we wanted in graph form for the iOS app, but we solved it. In addition, coming up with the formula to determine when a station is congested or not was quite complex.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The app includes many useful features that can help Hawai’i electric to see the status of their various stations. The iOS app is a user-friendly interface that tells them exactly what they want to know in real-time. We are proud of our interactive and beautiful graphs/charts that are embedded in the app. Also, our “Station Feed” is the key feature which shows all stations in a feed form with their status and summarized data. The formula that determines congestion is quite clever as well. Finally, our Python scripts that clean their data and output excel and JSON files with the clean data is very useful.

What we learned

Learned how to embed charts/graphs into our iOS app and how to write Python scripts to clean data and output different file types with the clean data.