WattWaiter 1.0 Released

My software development group has been working on a Wicket application that queries a server to retrieve data from the Oahu Power Grid and display an interface for a particular days power consumption or carbon intensities. We named this program WattWaiter.

Here is a brief overview of what the project is about:

Wattwaiter is a web application that provides a visual display of carbon intensities for a given day. This information can be used by consumers to adjust their electrical usage and become “smart” consumers. By observing carbon intensities, consumers can determine which times during the day are most efficient for electrical usage. This benefits the consumer by allowing usage of lower costing electricity and the electric company by balancing their load.

Carbon intensities are displayed in hourly increments with green, yellow, and red flags corresponding to low, moderate, and high carbon intensities respectively. Users are now able to adjust their electricity usage to coincide with lower intensity periods. A sample Wattwaiter display is shown below.

Here is a screenshot of the early stages of WattWaiter:

Wicket is a bit rough to learn, but reading the Wicket book and the wiki on Wicket helped a lot. I was soon able to program the Wicket way. Coming from a PHP, MySQL background, I found this a bit overkill, but I am sure that this kind of setup will pay off when the application grows.

Working in this team is really nice because I like to see all the assigned tasks come together. Communication between members is also really fun because we got to develop strategies and gain others perspectives as well as work with others code.

Honestly, I am quite happy with the way our system was designed, but not being an expert or even novice at Wicket at this point, I can guess that there will be a lot of room for improvement and better ways to do things.

Here is a screenshot of the software ICU (intensive care unit) as described in a previous post. This will give you an idea of how well our project is performing.




As you can see, we need to commit more often (churn). The problem with this is if there is a big overhaul in the project, or we need to redesign something, there's no way around this, because you're not going to commit. Also we need to develop more knowledge about the Wicket testing framework. We are having some issues developing proper tests for this.

Our Project Page is hosted here: http://code.google.com/p/wattwaiter/

Our distribution is here: http://wattwaiter.googlecode.com/files/wattwaiter-1.0.1122.zip

Our Wiki, User Guides and Dev Guides are here: http://code.google.com/p/wattwaiter/w/list