We decided to develop a simple monitoring software for public EV charging stations. In our case is this on our faculty where we have three EV charging stations. Virtual dashboard will be displayed on the screen in the faculty main lobby. The main task of the dashboard is to show the availability of charging stations, so you do not need to go outside to look at it itself. Our virtual dashboard is also synchronized with other project where they integrated a reservation for EV stations in your google calendar. Project was made along development of our dashboard. With reservations synchronized on google calendar and data in real time is possible to achieve better usage of the charging stations. In addition, we added ecology prospective, where we made a comparison between different effects of the pollution on environment.
Dashboard is very simple design, showing the availability of all three charging stations, and also the rate of power of which the stations are charging in the exact time. We have green or red light, showing if the station is available or not. On the left side of the dashboard is availability and charging data and on the right side is eco view.
Availability
On the figure 1 we can see three simple power meters for all three charging stations. Power analog meters are in percentage and maximum on the dashboard, is the maximum power of how much our station can deliver. Above the power meters there are the index numbers 1, 2, 3 which are assigning the charging station location. The colors beneath are showing us availability in real-time data. Green – meaning that is available for charging, and red displaying that the charging station is busy.
EcoView
On the figure 2 below we can see what we call eco view part, which is presenting quantity of carbon dioxide CO2 saved, or better said how much of CO2 is saved by driving with electrical vehicles.
In our eco view we have 4 comparisons of how CO2 poluttion affects the other aspects of nature. In all presented data, we assumed that charging stations were already operating for few months, and 10 tons of CO2 was already saved which is excatcly 11 MWh of energy emited.
Developing a monitoring device is nothing new, these days we have a bunch of Apps which are monitoring different values of data. With ecology perspective added to our virtual dashboard, we think we have taken the next step in presenting energy relations. Our comparisons of pollution of CO2 with the environment explain us how in nature everything is connected, for example how pollution of CO2 melts the ice on the north pole or how many trees we have planted.
About software
ThingsBoard is an open-source IoT platform for monitoring, data processing, visualization of data along with device management. It supports industry-standard IoT protocols – MQTT, CoAP and HTTP. ThingsBoard combines scalability, fault-tolerance, and performance to capture the device data for processing and monitoring. It provides its gateway server that can communicate with the attached devices. Build around Netty Framework due to which it provides support for many protocols and applications. New hardware protocols can be added by just adding Inbound and Outbound channel handlers for new protocols with the netty framework.
Comments