Show HN: A status dashboard for the NYC power grid

Show HN: A status dashboard for the NYC power grid(nycpowerstatus.com)

54 points by jpettersson 13 years ago | 16 comments

krschultz 13 years ago |

Hmm, I'm not sure I would say "At the moment 0% of Con Edison's Customers in Manhattan are Without Power". I currently have 4 people staying with me because their power is out in Battery Park, Chelsea, and Gramercy. It is definitely an improvement (I didn't have power or water until yesterday morning), but it's not over yet.

Looking at the ConEd official power outage map, they list roughly 10,000 people in Manhattan without power.

jpettersson 13 years ago | |

The ConEd data is a nested set of areas where each Area the fields: total_customers, customers_out. It seems there's a discrepancy between the number of customers_out for Manhattan and the sum of customers_out for Manhattans's sub areas.

I've decided to trust the sum of the individual sub areas instead, working on a fix.

jpettersson 13 years ago | |

Ah... I accidentally rounded to zero decimal places. Looks better now.

greenyoda 13 years ago |

Interesting data. It looks like not much restoration work has been going on in Queens: 86449 offline to begin, and still 73599 offline. And they tell me my power is going to be out until the 9th...

Does the "coned" gem use some public API that ConEd has, or does it just scrape their web site?

Note: "burough" should be "borough".

citricsquid 13 years ago | |

    http://apps.coned.com/stormcenter_external/stormcenter_externaldata/data/interval_generation_data/metadata.xml

Take a directory from here and use it here:

    http://apps.coned.com//stormcenter_external/stormcenter_externaldata/data/interval_generation_data/2012_11_03_20_45_00/report.js

from: https://github.com/ckundo/sandy/blob/master/lib/sandy/provid...

ckundo 13 years ago | |

The gem uses an obscured API endpoint that feeds http://apps.coned.com/stormcenter_external/. ConEd's version of the app makes 2 ajax calls, one to an xml file that gets regenerated every 15 minutes and shows the timestamp of the report json feed. The second call gets the json that gets parsed in the app.

I've done a rudimentary version of jpetterson's at http://stormpox.com (much less pretty). I'm running a rake task that gets called via cron job. The rake task fetches and parses the feed (via the sandy gem) and posts it to a google spreadsheet via the google_drive API. stormpox.com is running as a static site on heroku with an embedded google timeline chart that auto-updates when the spreadsheet changes, and voila, insta-outage-chart (albeit google branded).

The code for the stormpox.com backend is at https://github.com/ckundo/coned_charts.

The sandy gem (previously the coned gem) is on rubygems and here: https://github.com/ckundo/sandy

Again great work jpetterson!

jpettersson 13 years ago | |

It's interesting indeed. As of right now it looks like only Manhattan has seen drastic improvements. I hope you get your power back sooner than the 9th!

The coned gem (now https://github.com/ckundo/sandy) is craping data from the official Coned storm central site.

(Thanks, I fixed the typo. As a native Swedish speaker borough is one of those words that make no sense.)

jrockway 13 years ago | |

Does the "coned" gem use some public API that ConEd has, or does it just scrape their web site?

https://github.com/ckundo/coned/blob/master/lib/coned.rb#L12

jgv 13 years ago | | |

coned has some endpoints https://twitter.com/ckundo/status/265610079783514112

ckundo 13 years ago |

Perfect example of why to opensource your work; I never could have made this awesome design. Great work!

idan 13 years ago |

Neat.

How did you get google to serve up a white tileset? Or did you generate your own?

etcet 13 years ago | |

http://gmaps-samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/...

Turn the saturation down. This was found with 10 seconds worth of searching by the way.

idan 13 years ago | | |

I don't know what search terms you used, but I got lost in a thicket of docs on generating and uploading entirely custom tilesets, which I was hoping not to have to do.

Thanks for the link, less so for the snark!

danso 13 years ago |

Why does clicking on the Lower East Side green bubble (why is the bubble green, as that seems to correspond to a 0 percent outage in the text) take me to the Greenwich Village page?

I guess the bigger criticism is...the map view could use some work and given the non-officialness of neighborhood boundaries, maybe a map view isn't the most useful?