I’ve loved the energy sector recently and have become fascinated with home automation, EV’s and renewable energy in general. I also love tinkering with IoT devices and using software to do cool things. Before I moved house, I had a simple setup using an electric door release, a Zigbee relay and SmartThings to automatically unlock my front door when my location was near enough to my home. This simple setup probably cost less than £50 and added a massive convenience not just to myself so I could push open the door when carrying heavy things but also allows me to control access to others when I wasn’t home.
I’m not enjoying this to save time; Our current generation has the most amount of automation and tasks being done for us more than any other generation that has walked the planet, but we’re the busiest we’ve ever been. So I don’t see it as a time saver. It’s more that I can rely on software to turn off a light more reliably than I can a human (my kids that is). So we can use technology to save money and lower our carbon footprint whilst making our experience with technology a positive one.
I’ve recently had the privilege of working on a mobile app for one of our customers Indra Renewable Technologies which has combined all my interests into one project. This is the second app we have built for Indra and it offers an easy method to get an EV charger online using Bluetooth to connect to the charger from the mobile app. Being involved in the embedded software running on a Beagle Bone and writing Xamarin / Maui code to connect to it from the mobile app has been hugely rewarding. Speaking of which we even won an award for technology and trends, which has been the first time our efforts have been publicly recognised for such work.
We are now looking forward to building our next award winning mobile app. Ideally in the renewable energy space. If you’re looking for some software to transform your business, maybe Agile App Co. will be the partner for the job?
