2.0 PlugInBaby UI and User Workflow Description
- It is feasible to build and operate an IOTA-based charging station for electric vehicles. We were inspired by a prototype built by ElaadNL we assume that this station or something similar could be installed by individuals who wish to provide charging services to others.
Check out this blog post for more details. Their IOTA charger is pictured below.
- PlugInBaby is meant to extend the idea of a decentralised open source charging network. Electric and autonomous vehicles need to be able to identify and navigate to open charging stations and charging station proprietors must be able to communicate the state of their chargers to vehicles and other agents/bots needing electricity.
- We have restricted ourselves to using only IOTA as a database. This carries the theoretical advantages of future scalability, full decentralisation and zero transaction costs for messages sent to and from the (tangle) database as well as a mechanism for machine to machine electricity purchase.
- The API and interaction between the charger and the car app are out of scope for this hackathon.
- Charging station vendors can send status messages about their charging stations (free, in-use, offline) using 0 balance transactions to the tangle. We didn't build a UI for this part. Our backend provides this capability via terminal inputs. Since this is just a PoC we didn't build out an API or UI for this portion.
Users can query the tangle for the transactions of vendors with free stations and also read dynamic pricing information from the vendor messages written to the tangle. The search mechanism uses information written to tags while the state information about the charging station is written in the message and passed to the front end for interpretation in the UI.
- Step 1: The user uses either a smartphone app or an app integrated into their vehicle to query the tangle for available charging stations.
- Step 2: The user selects a charging station from the map. Each station has dynamic pricing which is shown in real-time along with the map pin when selecting the station.
- Step 3: The user arrives at the station and lets the station know that they are there by sending a message to the tangle.
- Step 4: The charging station tells the app that the car is fully charged.
- Step 5: The user's IOTA wallet is debited and the transaction is signed by the seed stored in the app.
- Step 6: The charger resets its status to available on the tangle and all the transactions/messages are available for verification.
