Car-bon

Flask backend application showing requests from app
Android; adding a trip
Android; history
IOS; Home screen with usage disk
IOS; adding a trip
IOS; History tab
IOS; add trip

Inspiration We live in a car-centered world. With how much we drive it can be very difficult to calculate and track your carbon footprint in our fast-paced world. It is hard to know if you’re doing more or less than others to help the environment. What it does Car-bon tracks how much carbon you produce in your day-to-day travel. It then takes your recent data and compares that to a goal, usually around or compared to the carbon usage of the average American.

How we built it We heavily used Git to collaborate among the 4 members of our team. Our backend used Flask to host our custom database which stores your list of previous trips and also contains the dataset of individual cars and their emissions statistics. Our front end was built using react-native, which allowed us to create a completely cross-platform application for both iOS and Android, and utilized different pages to help guide the user as they navigate through their carbon footprint

Challenges we ran into React was new to most of us and React Native was new to all of us. A lot of our time was spent finding libraries that were not deprecated, and debugging issues we didn’t quite understand. Since this was a larger more segmented application, we also had to be sure that each person was making code that was reusable and easy to use, as code would be referenced or reused on a lot of the pages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We were really proud the first time we were able to navigate between pages on our application, as it really helped motivate us having something tangible we had created, and made testing our project much easier. Another proud moment for us was when we got our front end integrated with the backend, and we were able to move away from hardcoded test data in the react app itself.

What we learned We learned a lot about front-end development and React/React Native. We strengthened our skills working on/in a team and got really good experience digging into documentation and finding information online about libraries and frameworks.

What's next for Car-bon We would love to add more options for tracking your carbon usage using Car-bon. The majority of people use methods of transit outside of driving, so being able to track those as well is really important. We would also think it is really important that we one day include a way for you to offset the carbon that you have produced, by allowing the user to buy carbon credits through us as an intermediary.

Business Plan We see a huge market in the coming future for carbon credits. As the platform that tracks your carbon usage, we foresee a huge opportunity to be able to then present and sell carbon credits to users. We would like to either be a marketplace where we charge a small fee for having access to the platform