Design of a Web Application for the Monitoring and Management of Photovoltaic Electric Charging Points for Mobile Devices in Commercial Environments

Abstract

This paper presents the results obtained from a research project to design a web application for monitoring charging points with photovoltaic energy for food establishments. The project begins with the collection of data from the target audience, a first survey aimed at restaurant owners and the second at customers. Afterward, the construction of the prototype is carried out, which involved the selection of a polycrystalline photovoltaic panel, a voltage regulator, and a battery. An ESP32-embedded device was used to take the generated electrical current and voltage values and upload them to the Thingspeak repository. Finally, the web application is developed based on three fundamental stages and it was designed to visualize the values of the variables stored in the cloud. The results of the survey applied to restaurant owners showed that 61.9% of those surveyed did not know if there were restaurants that offered electric charging services for mobile devices and that 61.9% preferred energy from renewable sources. The results of the survey applied to customers indicated that 55% of respondents were interested in using a web application to locate a restaurant with an electric charging service for mobile devices. In general, the research showed a lack of electric charging service for mobile devices in restaurants but also showed a wide potential demand to implement it with photovoltaic and renewable energy sources. The web application was developed in Node JS to act as a client-server between the data stored in the cloud and another stage in Mongodb where the data of voltage, electric current, and personal data of the user are stored. In the same way, a third stage was developed in React JS, which has the purpose of visualizing, through a graphical interface, the values of the variables stored in the cloud