Week 5: Proving Viability

This week, I completed setup for the environment where my senior project will be housed: ArcGIS Online with the ArcGIS API for Python. I also had the first section of my data pipeline execute successfully. The bulk of the work was applying for a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Alternative Fuels Station API key, then coding the initial script to query it. The ability to grab active charging-station locations, rather than relying on a static snapshot of data, is one of the core design goals of the tool, ideal for a planner coming in later to have a current picture of the infrastructure. Having that process work start-to-finish, even in a first rough pass, means the assumption of being able to work with live data that underlies the whole project has now been confirmed as viable. I also built out the script framework for the two major components: the coverage heatmap and the public facilities ranking. With that out of the way, I’ll be able to jump right into generating and visualizing buffers next week. Speaking of, my plan for next week is to work towards the completion of the first script (current station coverage heatmap), which will involve loading the NREL stations as an ArcGIS feature layer and creating 0.5-mile buffers to produce the charging infrastructure coverage heatmap.