WattDepot development began in October 2009 by Robert Brewer and Philip Johnson. At that time, the software was viewed as a relatively simple "plumbing" that would enable us to build a game-based environment for energy behavior change (which became the Kukui Cup project). We needed software to support energy collection, storage, and analysis at the "enterprise" level, something above the household but below the utility grid in terms of complexity and scalability.
The code was developed as open source and hosted using Google Project Hosting.
The code base borrowed heavily from the Sensorbase system developed for the Hackystat project.
A variety of applications for WattDepot were developed during this time, including a web application for display of energy data, a command line interface, a set of Google gadgets for WattDepot data, an energy simulator, an android interface, and a WattDepot Javascript client library.
In Spring, 2012, Andrea Connell took over active development of WattDepot. During this semester, she focussed on enhancing the system to work through cloud-based providers such as Heroku, porting the build system to Maven, and improving database performance. A perspective on her many accomplishments is available here
In Fall of 2013, we decided to rewrite the now four year old system from scratch in order to take advantage of newer technologies and a much improved understanding of the desired domain model. We are in discussions with other universities and commercial energy system vendors about the integration of WattDepot with their platforms.
We are excited about this next phase of development of the WattDepot platform.