Week 8: From Data to Desktop App

This was the most technical week on the project so far. The EV Coverage Analysis Tool reached a point where it operated as a cohesive end-to-end workflow: live data pipeline, hexagonal coverage heatmap, facility ranking engine, and finally a professional Windows desktop app to pull it all together. The heatmap evolved past basic point buffers to a hexagonal binning system, dividing DC into equal-area hexagons, each of which is scored by how many EV station service areas intersect it, weighted by population of the underlying census block group. This results in a coverage map much more useful for planning purposes than a basic point layer. The facility ranking algorithm was also improved; it takes a user-supplied Excel spreadsheet of candidate sites as input, buffers each by 0.5 miles, intersects those buffers with unserved census block groups, totals the population reachable, and produces a normalized 0-1 score per site. The path to the Excel input file was replaced by a file picker dialog so any user can supply their own data without modifying the code. Each of the three operations (sync EV stations from NREL, rebuild the heatmap, rank candidate sites) can now be accessed from a single desktop application (app.exe). The dark-themed GUI displays live console output to a built-in log window and has a status bar indicating idle/running/complete status. It was compiled into a standalone windows executable with PyInstaller, so it can run on any Windows machine regardless of Python installation. Now, one click of a button will run the full pipeline from start to finish.