Zeus | Devpost

Vehicle owners sign up for a new Zeus account
Vehicle owners link their cars to Zeus using the Smartcar API
The vehicle owner going through the Smartcar OAuth flow
The vehicle owner accepts permissions through the Smartcar OAuth flow
The vehicle owner sets their charge preferences
The vehicle owner sees the current status of their car
The valet can see current vehicles that need to be moved on their own dashboard
The valet is able to lock up the vehicle and indicate where the vehicle now is.
The valet views more cars to move

Inspiration

Offering employees EV charging stations is at first sight a major perk -- until they realize it takes upwards of 20 minutes out of one's day to move cars around and get a turn. This not only creates range anxiety about making it home save, but is a highly inefficient system. ESPECIALLY when many large companies already have people in charge of parking lots.

We quickly realized this problem exists beyond large tech companies -- every public space, small business, etc. faces similar issues. How to best queue and exchange electric vehicles to benefit the majority. How can we make free charging actually a perk?

What it does

Our hackathon project is the first part of a major online network of EV charge optimization. We first addressed the challenge for companies that have existing infrastructure surrounding parking: mostly large tech companies with valet services. The problem is not as niche as you may expect.

We enable employees to add their cars to a platform and take comfort in knowing their car will be charged by the time they leave. They enter their desired mileage range and time they wish to leave the office, while we remotely connect to the vehicle to pull range and charge information. We even go a step beyond and seamlessly integrate with actions of all major car brands. i.e. we can unlock and lock the car -- enabling us to move cars around, without ever requiring the employee to leave the building.

Furthermore, we send notifications every time your car is interacted with. You can rest assured your car will stay safe!

How we built it

We pulled an all nighter and built a dockerized flask app with two main user flows. The valet management portal in addition to the vehicle owner.

What's next for Zeus

The greater value comes when we fully flesh out our queue algorithm personalization and data collection. We were limited by the nature of a hackathon and would love to test with larger data sets over the course of months. We also know each use case requires different optimization strategies, which we can fine tune as we expand.

Starting at companies is only the beginning! You could even imagine our platform providing an Uber-esque model, where certified "demigods" move cars across towns and electricity grids. Various incentive or punitive models can be employed to make it financially stable and help with the transition to EV.

Demo

While we built the web platforms fully end-to-end overnight, we did not get to making a mobile version. Feel free to clone our git repo and try it out, or check out figma mocks for a sneak peak of mobile: https://www.figma.com/proto/QOaqkRo3xYGfllJ39YaNQhdI/zeus-mobile?node-id=11%3A69&scaling=scale-down