Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
fuelfinder.uk
Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#2While not my most sophisticated project from technology perspective, it works, and is high-load proof.
It is almost entirely depends on github pages and actions, with a single exception being an AWS lambda which logs submitted data into Cloudwatch (which is the later collected by a cron github action).
Source code here: "https://github.com/sztanko/fuelfinder
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#3Suggestion: allow override of the geolocation-derived search epicentre, it's not always (read: has never been reliable for me, unless I'm using a device with a GPS chip). I do appreciate that's the primary aim for this project, rather than desktop, though.
Also, perhaps display where it thinks you are too, so you can determine if it's massively off.
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#4Great idea!
On iPhone Safari it’s not detecting my location. Is it supposed to prompt me to share the location? I don’t get anything.
Update: Nevermind, it works once I enabled location sharing in my privacy settings.
I will share this with others.
As per another comment, it would be good if we could search or choose a location.
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#5For those not in the UK wondering what this is all about: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/what-is-cau...
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#6The fuel crisis in the UK has been great at being EV advocates out of the woodwork, but our infrastructure for charging cars is appalling and as I cycled I rather smugly saw queues at the ev chargers too.
But something like this for EVs that also shows the cost of charging would be great.
Yes I know about zap map, etc... But in my area the choices are poor, the availability difficult to discover (rate limited and polling for status of chargers?), but mostly the payment is a nightmare with opaque pricing across wild and sometimes exorbitant ranges that seems difficult to discover.
Would love to see this tool for EV chargers but with prices, public access, filterable, and centred on my location.
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#7Nice idea. I get my info from the local facebook group, which seems to have a thread in the morning and evening.
A couple of thoughts:
1) I live in the middle of a number of ESSO stations, it's hard to know which one it is, based on a distance, and I dont want to click through to directions. Local facebook group users just give the neighbourhood it's in.
2) The information is very time sensitive, you could order results based on recent update, or availability, instead of closeness or perhaps just emphasise that the update was a long time ago etc. Related to that, try for the time info a bit easier to grasp. 1334m, 23 hours, a day ago, etc Related to that, the majority of stations information are about a day old, but the results say it was updated 10 mins ago. This results update time information doesnt mean as much as the freshness from a station.
going back to the facebook group, there is a kind of social network reward for contributing and updating others.
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#8For those not in the UK wondering what this is all about: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/what-is-cau...
The overriding sentiment right now is isolated shortages have turned into widespread shortages because of panic buying, not actual shortages or HGV driver shortages.
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#9Great idea! On iPhone Safari it’s not detecting my location. Is it supposed to prompt me to share the location? I don’t get anything. Update: Nevermind, it works once I enabled location sharing in my privacy settings. I will share this with others. As per another comment, it would be good if we could search or choose a location.
I agree it would be great to chose the location and I will try to come up with some solution.
Essentially, the main challenge here is that this is 99% statically hosted project. You download the full list of fuel stations and the app then shows you the closes ones.
We have around 7k fuel stations across the UK, which is 350kb compressed, so not a big issue.
However, full postcode list (1,768,727 postcodes) is 20MB compressed (62MB uncompressed), that won't be acceptable to be handled on the client device.
I am thinking of cutting off the last two characters off postcode, that will give us 11k rows and 286kb with around 1 mile precision in densely populated areas, that will do the trick.
In any case, I only started working on it on Sunday. Still have couple of ideas to implement, but need to do my day to day work :)
Re: Show HN: Open-source UK fuel availability tracker
#10This is great but I feel like it's more important to educate people not to panic-buy fuel since that's adding a significant strain to the problem (thanks to the media). If people filled up when they normally would have the problem wouldn't have been so huge.
Also, why do I have to share my location? What happened to the good old days of just being able to enter postcode or town?!