HECO Rewards App

In 2019, I participated in the hackathon event. HACC (Hawaii Annual Code Challenge) is an event where various groups participate in creating an application in a certain amount of time. These groups compete with each other and at the end, we showcase our application we developed to a panel of judges.

The 2019 HACC had several challenges/themes that we could choose from to base our application on. We chose the energy/heco electric vehicle charging analysis challenge. The challenge for this topic was to create a dashboard displaying the health of EV car charging stations around the island and update their status every 5 - 10 minutes using key metrics developed from charging data analysis. This challenge was to help HECO find a system that notifies them about the charging stations around Oahu and monitor their status. If a charging station breaks, HECO would be notified via an application and this will let them have enough time to send a worker out to fix it.

My group consisted of 8 members in which we broke up into 3 teams; backend, frontend, and hardware. The backend team focused on creating the database to store the information received from the charging stations, the frontend team focused on designing a user friendly application to display the health of charging stations around Oahu and information about them, and hardware focused on building a machine using a raspberry pi that scans and recognize license plates.

I was part of the front end team, in charge of developing the native mobile app for our rewards system. Our mobile app allows customers to take a short survey whenever they use the charging stations. These surveys consist of questions that’ll help HECO on determining the health of the charging stations. When the customer finishes the survey, they get points that are added to their account where they can later redeem it for free electric charges.

This hackathon has taught me so much about mobile development. I have never used Android Studio before, so I had a bit of a learning curve to tackle when starting this app. This project was stressful for me because I had to learn many techniques that I wasn’t used to, such as multithreading and converting data into JSON format and sending it to the database. Overall, this was a valuable experience for me and the amount of work that me and my team did earned us first place in the hackathon.

You can learn more about what my team did here.