Project
BAT Powerwall — Geospatial Service-Mapping System
An interactive touchscreen map for a septic-services business: a customer spreadsheet reverse-geocoded into a filterable Folium map with pricing zones, service-due heatmaps, and upsell alerts — on a repurposed big-screen TV with an infrared touch overlay.
A septic-services business runs on two questions: where are my customers, and who’s due? Both answers sat in a spreadsheet no one could actually see. I turned it into a map you could walk up to and touch.
The problem
The customer list had everything and showed nothing. Routing ran on memory, reminders were ad hoc, and the upsell opportunities in the data — a cluster overdue on one road, customers in a pricing zone — were invisible because the data had no spatial form.
Constraints
- Effectively no budget — free libraries, hardware on hand.
- Usable by non-technical staff — no query language, no training. Walk up and touch.
- The display was a repurposed big-screen TV.
Approach
I reverse-geocoded the spreadsheet with geopy and built an interactive
Folium map, pandas handling the data. On top I layered what the business
cared about: pricing zones drawn as regions, service-due heatmaps that make
overdue clusters jump out, and upsell flags.
Then I made it physical: the map ran full-screen on a big-screen TV fitted with an infrared touch overlay — a wall-sized tablet you explored by pinching to zoom and dragging to pan, with a mouse as fallback.
Keeping it current was automatic. The customer list lived as an Excel file on a shared drive the office already maintained; a scheduled task ran after close each day — reading the file, cleaning new entries, geocoding new addresses, and rebuilding the map — so every morning reflected the prior day with no manual step.
Outcome
It replaced a physical wall map the owner and secretary updated by moving stickers — only ever as current as the last time someone re-stuck it.
The shop adopted the digital version and ran on it. I don’t have hard numbers — small family business, not an instrumented product — but it did what the sticker map couldn’t: overdue clusters surfaced for tighter routing, upsell-fit customers got flagged, and service-due accounts got caught before they slipped. The map became where people looked to decide where the trucks went.