Charge

After that sweet Rav4 EV visited our driveway recently I’ve been interested in the refueling issues that owners of these cars face, so I did some research. I’ve discovered a U.S. government agency called NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) that provides an API (Application Programming Interface) which presents a current data set of the locations around the country with electric vehicle recharge stations, by State.

I signed up for their API and then developed this new mobile app called Charge, based on their data. I have to say that not every location is represented as I know there are some in Wyoming but they’re not showing up here. That said, the number of locations in this live data-set is impressive. It takes a bit of time to load up California :-)

I’ve also implemented smart-caching into the app so that once you load a State it stays in memory. When you click on a location within a State it shows the specifics of the charging station. You can launch a Google Map to the place by clicking the address and if you click a phone number it will open your phone app so you can call them.

You can run the app Here.