Blogs

Power Tracker - A side project that shows power grid consumption and grid emissions intensity in the UK. As part of the green transition of the power grid in the UK, many previous sources of power such as Coal & Gas generation have slowly been usurped by Wind energy. This process is actually far more advanced than most people realise. With Wind generation now accounting for the largest source of energy now and the carbon dioxide emissions of the grid falling precipitously as a result of this (and other things).

The idea of Power Tracker is to demonstrate this to people and allow them to make intelligent decisions about power consumption to further reduce their personal carbon dioxide emissions by proxy.

Power tracker hooks into the UK National Grid services and fetches data detailing where power has been generated today (and is forecast to be generated) and creates a carbon dioxide emissions profile based on this. It uses the data to predict future emissions for the rest of the day. Testing is now completed and should soon be released to the app store under my new app store account.

Background

I have been working for the last 5 years as a Senior iOS Engineer in various team configurations. That recently came to an end due to an unfortunate redundancy. I took some time after this happened to ensure I was following a path in my career that I value. It’s important to grow both as an individual and as a developer. Part of the individual area was to work on fitness (which I may talk about some time) and to spend time with the family over summer, but another part was as a developer. As a developer I wanted to expand my portfolio to demonstrate my abilities to future prospective partners and employers. Just like other developers around the world I have worked on a number of side projects but they have rarely seen the light of day due to being unfinished, attention lost to other things or a perfectionist mindset. Due to this introspection after my redundancy I have committed to completing more projects and getting them online so that people could try them out. My reasoning is to get work out there to show off to others. If the projects are interesting to others and get traction I can continue working on them further to provide more value. But at worst, they will be a little portfolio piece that I can show off my skills with.

This led to my first side project developed with this idea in mind. I built it in some spare time over a period of about 3 weeks with the idea to try out some frameworks that I’ve been interested in.

The first of these is Swift Charts; something I’ve tinkered with before and been curious about but haven’t managed to use professionally due to iOS version problems (with it only really supporting newer iOS versions). It seemed like a really nice framework to display data to app users in a more standardised way and as with most things in life, the best way to learn how to use it is with a real example. So all the data the app sucks down from the UK National Grid is spit out using Swift Charts.

The second of these is Widgets; Having used these briefly in a hackathon before and not really paid much attention to, I figured they would make a great companion extension for my Power Tracker App. Providing quick info on power data to interested observers I think it provides a great little tool for those who may be curious at a glance, but not curious enough to monopolise their attention. Widgets also allow for interplay with the Apple Watch, reusing the same components to display data to the watch face as to a widget component.

The final thing is a bit more simple; trialling the flexibility of component layouts over the whole Apple ecosystem. SwiftUI allows for reuse on a much more universal level than previously attempted and as a result the app has a uniform codebase between its iPhone, iPad and Watch versions. View components within the app have no real discernible difference between iPhone and iPad, with the only difference being a really simple layout configuration change. I’ve not had much reason to bring one app into a universal setting like this before so it felt nice to give it a go.

What is the plan going forward with Power Tracker? Well not too much right now really. I set myself the goal of deploying the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to get the app out before I lose focus and something else grabs my attention. If the app is received well I would love to add more stuff like how much power is currently being consumed, how expensive power is right now and regional supply data (Scotland has a very different power grid than South East England for example). Optional push notifications to inform users of low/high carbon intensity periods would also be nice for those who have power demands that can be moved to other times of the day (such as car charging). I have no plans for monetisation for the app, although I would consider a Patreon/Ko-Fi style donation option if users write to me and request it - but having people use my little app here would give me satisfaction that would make me happy.