WattDepot to the Rescue!

This week, I’ll be sharing with all of you my experiences with WattDepot in the past few days. As you may already know from my previous post (and from other sources), Hawaii is not in a very good position right now in regards to energy reliance and the future prospects of its energy. That’s where WattDepot can be a stepping stone—several, in fact—to building up public awareness of energy as well as bringing Hawaii into a state of renewable energy usage rather than continued reliance on oil.

First off, WattDepot is an open-source project that uses electrical monitors to record and report data to a server, which can then be accessed through client programs and applications. Users can collect data from different locations, different time periods, and even manipulate them to get another perspective on the data, such as a sorting by consumption amounts.

Because there are so many features that WattDepot has to offer, there was only one way to tackle learning how to use the API and the many components of WattDepot-- Katas, of course! The katas I needed to implement in order to become comfortable with WattDepot were:

1. Connecting to a server and listing the sources hooked up to it, along with their descriptions.
2. Calculating and listing the latency (how current the data is) of the sources, sorted by increasing latency.
3. Displaying the hierarchical listing of the sources and subsources.
4. Listing the energy consumption of each source from yesterday.
5. Listing the highest power consumption recorded yesterday along with the time at which it was recorded.
6. Calculating and listing for each source the average energy consumed over the past two Mondays.

Starting off with these katas was not too bad at all, because I was using a WattDepot simpleapp as sort of a template for the first two. The part that was tricky with kata #2 was the sorting of the latency. I had to brush up on my Collections, Generic Data Types and Comparators and implement an additional class called Data to help take care of the sorting. This made this kata take much longer than I expected it to-- maybe about an hour in total, whereas kata #1 took only a couple of minutes to complete.

Then came katas 3 and 4. My goodness, were these tough for me! Without much of a template to follow, I was stuck with going out and staring at the API for several hours trying to make sense of it. I could see what I wanted with the subsources and energy consumption, but I just did not know how exactly to get it. Perhaps it is a difficulty common to most programmers, or maybe it's just me, but I tend to have quite a difficult time understanding APIs (other than the Java API). It's like, "ok, I see you, and I want to get you. But how exactly do I do that?! And what kind of data type do you return?!" I guess I've been relying on the Java API too much.. But finally, finally after hours and hours (and hours and hours) of painfully staring at the computer screen (occasionally wanting to just hurl my laptop into the wall), I was able to figure out a way to parse through the list of subsources, figure out what the hierarchical ordering is logistically supposed to be, and then implementing a way to display it in a list. Phew! That only took 5 hours! Now on to kata 4.. Kata 4 took about 3 hours to complete, because I was slightly warmed up to using the API and I had already designed a Data class and a sorting class that I could tweak just a little to get it to work with the Energy Consumption values. Figuring out the calendar dates and whatnot was a pain, but other than that, it was not too bad overall.

I was already pretty much out of time by the time I got around to finishing Kata #4, so currently I only have part of Kata #5 implemented, and I did not even get to start on the last one. It was difficult to get these katas done in such a short amount of time, especially since the WattDepot application is one that I am not familiar with, and so it took a while to even minimally understand how it works. Especially for me, because I know that I take a really long time to learn knew things, more time is always very helpful. I probably could have paced out my scheduling for this assignment a little better, but sometimes you just get really crazy days where you can't do much of anything, and that happens to everyone, so you just have to live with the consequences and do better next time.

Through this exploration, I learned a lot about WattDepot—its capabilities, its potential, and just a few of its many features. WattDepot is an extremely neat and useful tool, and it is great for many applications. I can see it being used not only to monitor and report energy consumption and generation, but also using that information to analyze what is using a majority of the energy and where. This information, as well as many other findings can be used to inspire more reserved energy usage and help solve Hawaii’s energy crisis problem. Energy data manipulation may seem like only a concern for electricians and engineers who have to set up and monitor electrical components, but it can actually be constructed into user-friendly applications to be used by anyone to visually see what they are doing to their environment and their wallets. I sure hope to see a lot of people in the near future using applications as such to really think about their lifestyles and change for the better-- for their health, their finances, and their surroundings.