EV Stations

🧪 Experimental

@ev@botsin.space is a Mastodon bot to get electric vehicle (EV) charging stations near a location in the United States or Canada.

Highlights

• Mention it with just a requested location and it will reply with some charging stations near it.
• The links provided in the results (even though they point to Apple Maps) will automatically open either Apple or Google Maps depending on your device.
• If the response doesn't fit in one post due to Mastodon's character limit it will be split into a couple of posts.
• The response includes symbols for the available connector types at each station:
  • Ⓣ Tesla aka North American Charging Standard (NACS)
  • Ⓙ J1772
  • ⒸⒸⓈ Combined Charging System (CCS) aka J1772 Combo
  • Ⓝ⑭-㊿ NEMA 14-50
  • Ⓝ⑤-⑮ NEMA 5-15
  • Ⓝ⑤-⑳ NEMA 5-20
  • ⒸⒽⒶ CHAdeMO

Usage

Post this from your Fediverse account:

@ev@botsin.space Brickell, Miami

Query examples:

• 60601
• Wrigley Field
• chinatown, chicago
• financial district, san francisco

Limitations

• Station data including the available connector types is provided by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at NREL.gov. It may differ from the data on Google and Apple maps. Check the station network's official website for more info.
• Tested from Mastodon and Firefish accounts. It may or may not work from other Fediverse platforms.

Technical Documentation

Architecture

Architecture diagrams are available in the editable svg file architecture.drawio.svg. You can edit it with Draw.io or simply view it below.

Diagrams

You'll need a Kubernetes distribution with dns, helm, and metrics-server addons enabled. For a Raspberry Pi deployment you can use MicroK8s.

Installation

You'll need to specify:

• Queue broker (RabbitMQ) configuration: Erlang cookie and password.
• Watcher configuration: password to connect to the queue broker.
• A Mastodon token with read:statuses + read:notifications permissions.
• Worker configuration: password to connect to the queue broker.
• A non-default user agent to comply with the geocoder's terms of service.
• A Mastodon token with write:statuses permissions and a post visibility setting.
• A token for the NREL.gov API.

To install/upgrade from the solution directory:

RELEASE=myrelease
CHART=.
NAMESPACE=mynamespace

helm dependency update

helm upgrade $RELEASE $CHART -n $NAMESPACE --create-namespace -i \
  --set global.queue.svc=$RELEASE-rabbitmq \
  --set rabbitmq.auth.password=XXXXXXXXXX \
  --set rabbitmq.auth.erlangCookie=XXXXXXXXXX \
  --set watcher.queue.producerpassword=XXXXXXXXXX \
  --set watcher.masto.notificationtoken=XXXXXXXXXX \
  --set worker.queue.consumerpassword=XXXXXXXXXX \
  --set worker.cache.svc=$RELEASE-redis-master \
  --set worker.geocoder.useragent=mybot \
  --set worker.masto.posttoken=XXXXXXXXXX \
  --set worker.masto.visibility=direct \
  --set worker.nrel.token=XXXXXXXXXX \

Uninstall

helm uninstall $RELEASE -n $NAMESPACE --wait
kubectl delete namespaces $NAMESPACE