A Mobile App for the Electric Mobility of the Future

Initial Position

The demand and thus also the registration of electric cars is increasing rapidly. Of course, this means that more and more charging options are needed. It has long been clear: the future will be electric. The company sun2wheel has developed a unique solution for charging and discharging electric cars in order to fully exploit the potential of the energy in electric car batteries, which is sometimes underused today. The aim is to orchestrate the various consumers (e-car, heating, household, etc.), the generators (photovoltaic, power grid, etc.) and the storage (battery, e-car, etc.) in such a way that you can be as self-sufficient as possible on the road and thus saves money.

Sitewerk was allowed to support sun2wheel in the conception, design and programmatic implementation of the necessary software (cloud backend and mobile app).

A mobile app that explains a complex topic simply

The big challenge in this project was to make a demanding, technical topic suitable for everyday use and to prepare it in such a way that it is easy and understandable for the users. For example, we are not talking about kWp or kWh, but about kilometers that I can drive my car or costs that I can save with my solar system. "It is important that the user can understand the values," says Marco Piffaretti, founder of sun2wheel AG during one of the many concept workshops. With the sun2wheel software, countless configurations and their hundreds of different combinations can be set. In the mobile app, the various configurations have been broken down and greatly simplified. Today, the user can only choose between four different charging modes (from Eco: "only charge with green electricity" to Boost: "I want a fully charged car, no matter what kind of electricity").

Technology

The backbone of the sun2wheel platform is a .NET Core backend hosted in the Azure Cloud and a PostgreSQL database. Communication from the cloud to the hardware (charging stations at the customer's site) takes place via the cloud-native messaging system nats.io, which allows bi-directional communication in real time.

Administrators of sun2wheel AG can register new customers and configure new charging stations and their hardware via an Angular SPA. The front end for the end customers is a PWA (Progressive Web App) developed with the Ionic Framework (Angular). This allows the app to be started using a URL, thus avoiding installation via the app store.