Carbon Commute

Introduction to system

Carbon Commute is a system to record and estimate a user’s carbon footprint during their travel to work, whilst respecting their privacy and giving them increased control over the data recording from this activity. It involves an mobile phone application that records a users’ location data and uploads it to a server application. Each user is assigned their own Personal Container, isolated and controlled by themselves, which runs applications within itself and allows user control of the access to their data.

The Carbon Commute system has 3 main parts; a mobile phone application, one or more installs of the “locker” personal container software, and applications that run within locker. In our implementation we used an iPhone for the mobile platform, and ran lockers on servers hosted by the university computer service.

iPhone App

The mobile application is responsible for collecting location data when the user is commuting to or from their workplace. It allows the user to set their work and home locations' and then monitors and records the users location when travelling between these points. Once a GPS path has been recorded, it is uploaded to a remote server, running the users locker, where it is used to calculate the carbon footprint of the user.

The application records the most accurate GPS updates it can during the commute, and calculates speed and headings at the same time. The timestamp of the start and end of the commute is also recorded. This is then packaged into a JSON object and uploaded to the users locker.

iPhone App Internals

 * description of app classes, data flow through app etc.
 * requirements to install and run app, instructions to do so, using Test Flight etc

Downloading and running the iPhone Application

• Link to code on Github

Locker

• Introduction

• Overview of what locker provides, history

• link to original locker code

• Info on locker install in the lab, how to create, destroy, start, stop lockers etc.

 * setup of VMs at computing service
 * DNS setup, location of relevant files etc
 * Web Server front end setup, etc
 * LXC Container setup
 * Locker install with containers

Locker App

• Introduction

• How a locker app works within locker

• locker end-point for data info

• data used by app, overview of UI.