The problem AirWatt solves

Why do we exist?

According to an article from NDTV, India's Power companies lose more than Rs. 55,000 Crore every year due to electricity theft, meter tampering, power line manipulation and various other factors.

AirPower helps you to solve these and many more!

What's AirPower?

AirPower is a collection of complete end-to-end services, based on top of an IoT device.

The IOT device can be installed in residences as a replacement for existing energy meters.

The Device

We're using an ACS712 Sensor, along with an Arduino ESP8266, using which the input power readings are measured and uploaded to firebase.

Services

We offer mainly two platforms for our services around the device, a web-based admin dashboard and a flutter based companion app for consumers.

Features

• Powerful dashboard
  An incredibly powerful & intuitive dashboard, for seamless integration between all the services.

• Complaints Tracker
  Keep on track with all the issues, that your consumers are facing, in a powerful yet simple way.

• Theft Detection
  Stay on track with all the issues, that your consumers are facing, in a powerful yet simple way.

• Map Clusters
  Realtime updates that can pan across a whole city, state or even a continent, helping you detect power fluctuations, outrage etc.

• Perfect Companion
  Provide an immersive experience to your consumers, with our companion app.

Challenges we ran into

There were a couple of challenges we ran into, during these 48 hours,

Meter Tampering

Lots of them were related to the hardware, as tampering with home meters is not legally allowed, we had to come up with some workarounds, such as using a home appliance (A 7W electric bulb in our case) and measure its power for demonstration purposes.

Uploading data to the cloud

As of today, The first-party firebase library for Arduino only supports realtime database, there is no support for Cloud Firestore as of now, which is used by our web app and flutter app, finding a work around for this was quite challenging, we brainstormed together for hours on StackOverflow, Arduino community, until we finally came up with a workaround to create a REST API that receives the device readings in a POST request and updates those in cloud firestore.

GSAP

Coming to the website, The landing page of our website heavily relies on GSAP, which I had never used before this hackathon. I'm proud to say in these 48 hours, I was able to grasp the essentials of GSAP on my fingertips and that's something I can add to my list of skills.