Using your EV and a CDP in your home!
A pet project of ours many years ago was to instrument a CDP into your home, to prove there is not much you cannot do with a CDP!
This project started out as just monitoring the generation of solar power on the roof of the house, and notifications being sent when generations started, stopped and peaked inbetween.
But it quickly grew to something much more! With the purchase of an electric car and acceptance onto a trial for a Vehicle to Home charger*, a purchase of an electric motorcycle and a solar energy diverter for heating the hot water, the project affectionally called ‘ProjectEVAS’ was born.
Using just a Raspberry Pi (4), an early adopter of the Indra Technologies Electric Vehicle charger (with CHAdeMO connector), Tealium iQ (TMS) and Tealium AudienceStream (CDP) - the project was born!
“A moments pauses to explain what Vehicle to Home means… This means, on certain electric vehicles with the CHAdeMO charger support, bi-directional charge can be achieved. Not only can you put electrons into the battery pack of the electric car, but you can also take the electrons OUT of the car to power ‘something’ - in this case, via the special charger, we were able to power a house! My house :)”
At the time, the CDP being used to instrument the home was Tealium’s AudienceStream, coupled with Tealium iQ as the TMS. The interesting idea was actually an extension of something created ‘in the lab’ during my tenure at Tealium, whereby the amazing and most excellent EMEA engineering team came up with the idea of using a Raspberry Pi to instrument an air hockey and fooseball (table top football) table).
So with a Raspberry Pi at the hand, with a simple Apache Web Server loaded, the Tealium iQ uTag.js bootloader was added, the Collect tag was deployed and away we go…
From there, events were collected as calls were made to the web server from the electric car and bike chargers, plus the solar inverter and the energy diverter (all of which have accessible API’s - this was key). Using the API’s, we were able to make the required calls to achieve the following:
How much energy is left in the electric cars battery pack
What meetings are logged in my Gmail calendar
What is the weather like now and in the coming hours (those with electric vehicles will know only too well, bad/cold weather means fewer miles per kWh…)
How much solar generation is being made
What time is the next meeting
Where is the next meeting
All of this allowed us to work out based on the weather and current capacity of the electric car battery, do we have enough charge to do a return journey without stopping (if not, top up!).
It was a simple but complex use case, which enabled us to use a CDP and a TMS to implement. Making the chargers, solar panels and electric car battery pack part of the CDP architecture allowed us to query and react accordingly.
“Now, the question is, if you can imstrument a CDP and TMS in your home, you can instrument it anywhere! Your creativity is your only limitation.”
