I was one of the early adopters of an electric vehicle (EV) in India when I purchased a Tata Nexon EV back in July 2021. Since then, I was getting a constant stream of questions from curious folks about the range and charging cost of EV compared to conventional fuel cars. Being a data nerd, I decided to leverage AWS to build a simple website to track and visualize my EV's charging and travel history.

The building blocks of this solution are as seen below. There are three main components to it- (1) a database to store charging and travel data, for which I use Amazon Aurora MySQL as a fully-managed highly-available database, (2) a web server to run the website where I enter the data and view the historical data, for which I use an Amazon EC2 Spot Instance which allows me to use AWS's spare compute capacity at a very low cost, and (3) a visualization tool to make charts and graphs from the data, for which I use Amazon Quicksight. Just to make my website load faster and to protect it from malicious attacks, I am using Amazon CloudFront as content delivery network, and AWS WAF as a firewall.

The website is a simple single page PHP site that I created in an hour, it is not going to win any design awards. It provides a form to input car charging details and car's travel details which it feeds to the database and calculates a few things from it for cost analysis

The website also has an option to fetch the entire charging history and show some insights such as the total cost of each charge based on the unit cost of a kWh of electricity and how many units were consumed in each charging cycle.

It also has an option to fetch the travel history. Here it shows additional insights such as the calculated effective range of my EV extrapolated from how many kilometres did I drive and how much percentage battery I used for the same, and the resultant cost per km (so that I can make all the petrol car driving people jealous of how I am saving 80-90% per km!)

Finally, there is an option to see a visualiztion that drills down into details such as the split of where I am charging my EV, how much does it cost per km to charge depending on the location, trend of what range I am getting over a period of driving, etc.

This was a fun little project that I created in a weekend, so it is by no means perfect and polished. If you are interested in building something like this, you can easily do so by creating your own free AWS account and using the tons of free reference resources available, or reach out to me and I will be happy to help!