Have you ever ridden a nearly-dead e-bike across campus, only to find every charger taken? Or opened a vendor mini-program whose UI made you want to give up?
ZJU-Charger is a one-click visual site for checking charging-station availability at Zhejiang University. It goes after three problems: stations are hard to find, vendor entrances are scattered, and status checks are inconvenient.
It now covers most stations on the Yuquan, Zijingang, Huajiachi, Xixi, and Zhijiang campuses. Coordinates were corrected by hand. Used by 5K+ ZJUers; Excellence Award in the 2025 AMap Spatial Intelligence Developer Competition.
For a longer Chinese write-up, see the WeChat article: ZJU Charger: 便捷高效的充电桩查询助手
Features
- Campus switch — tap a campus card to see every station there.
- Station sorting — with location on, sort by distance or by free slots.
- Navigation — long-press or double-click a station to open AMap or the system maps app.
- Favorites — star the stations you actually use; they stay at the top.
- Light & dark — switch themes from the top right.
It also supports iOS Shortcuts: subscribe to a few stations and check them from the home screen.
How it came together
This was the first product I shipped end to end. A Next.js frontend talks to a FastAPI API; a background fetcher pulls several vendors into a local SQLite cache, so the site, the shortcut, and the DingTalk bot all read the same snapshot instead of hitting vendors on every request. The map is AMap.
It launched on CC98 and landed in the Top 10 twice — once at #1. That was enough signal to keep going: more campuses, more vendors, favorites, shortcuts, and a lot of coordinate fixes from people who actually ride there.