WattWaiter Version 2.1 Release

WattWaiter 2.1 is the second release of the WattWaiter system. Version 2.1 introduced two new pages. A stop light page which provides users a visual representation of the current hour's carbon intensity has been added as well as a grid info page which provides a graphical representation of the carbon intensities of a specified source. By providing this information, WattWaiter hopes to help increase consumers' awareness about when they should plan energy use. Consumers can make informed decisions about scheduling their electricity usage to coincide with low carbon intensity periods.

The stop light page categorizes the current hour's carbon intensity into three categories represented by a green, yellow, or red light for low, moderate, and high carbon intensity respectively. The hours are categorized into colors based on their predicted carbon intensities for that day. The twelve lowest hours are given a green rating, the six next highest hours are given a yellow rating, and the six highest hours are given a red rating. The Wattdepot system is queried at the top of the hour for the current carbon intensity level.

The grid info page provides users with a graphical representation of the carbon intensity over a period of time. A user is able to specify a source, start date, and end date. There are also other options that the user can select such as if they would like to see a cumulative or transitive display, whether they would like to see the carbon or energy generated, and the time frame for the graph. After selecting these options, a user is provided with a line graph that represents the changing carbon intentiy over the specified period of time.

There were many new thing that were learned throughout the course of this project. The Wicket Framework, HTML, and CSS were some of the topics that were new to me. I found that learning to use these new syntaxes was a challenging task. Prior to this project, I had a very limited knowledge of HTML and CSS. It took a while until I got the hang of using their syntax. I also struggled with the Wicket Framework at the start, but it became easier to understand through working with it. There were also team and project management issues that were learned such as getting the whole team involved in development and keeping track of project issues. The Google project issue tracker helped with both of these issues by allowing assignment of tasks to members so everyone knew what they were resonsible for. As in version 1.0, I thought that our team worked well together. We didn't have to make many adjustments to the way our group was functioning. We helped one another when we got stuck, so we could keep progress moving forward. Overall, I found this experience to be a positive one.

The WattWaiter project page, where users are able to download the WattWaiter 2.1 system, can be found here. There is also additional information such as a user guide, developer guide, and release notes that can be viewed. A screenshot of WattWaiter 2.1 is shown below.