Advanced Visualizations, New Frontier on Familiar Grounds

As the planning of the UH Dorm Energy Competition continues, there are still other things we are considering to implement. Shifting from WattDepot Applications, I am going to be working on a new topic, Advanced Visualizations. This new group is sort of like the WattDepot-App's Visualizer, except we are going to explore the different Google Visualizations and see how we can apply some of them to WattDepot.

The main group consists of , but I will be working with Kendyll Doi, the same Kendyll Doi from WattDepot Applications, as a sub group.

In order to get started, Prof. Johnson provided a few suggestions of what we could do. Right now, I'm just looking at the different suggestions and getting the feel of how I would implement them. Details about which framework we should use, either Wicket or Google Gadget, will be sorted out sometime this week.

Here are some of the suggestions that I think would be duo-able:

Rolling Update of Sensor Data

This visualization basically combines the idea of the monitor (i.e. get the latest value) with the trend line (show changes over time).

The idea is to have a visualization where you specify the source(s),the update interval (i.e. 30 seconds, 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day), and the window size (i.e. 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week), and the result is a chart that is refreshed every update interval and shows the last window size of data.

The reason why I like this idea is that in theory it sounds like the WattDepot Visualizer, but with an added refresh event and without the messy-ness of multiple sources, although in theory it could accommodate multiples (since it already does that). The only problem I'm seeing right now is that if the refresh interval is set too short, say 30 seconds.

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Gauge

An alternative visualization for the "monitor" gadget. Also has red/yellow/green capability like the stoplight.

A simple enough visualization, similar to a speedometer in a car. However, the challenge with this one is that the example Gauge visualization shows that the limits between red, yellow, and minor are hard-coded values out of 100. My thoughts would be to try and scale all the values to 100, but that would require some type of maximum calculation for all data being presented, and since the data would be streaming live, it would be hard to set a number to scale to 100.

Indeed there are a lot more other Visualizations to choose from, but at this point the refreshing annotated timeline, and gauge seem to be the most plausible. The other visualizations such as Bio Heat Map for displaying energy generated and Term Cloud for quickly displaying a source that's consuming the most energy also seem plausible, but Kendyll and I are going to play around with the refreshable timeline, and possible Gauge to get us going. Our first weekly meeting for this new group with Prof. Johnson is scheduled for this Thursday. More details to come as Kendyll and I decide which framework and visualization to attempt to implement.