Carboniferous

The landing page for the app

Inspiration

Just about everyone loves to travel, but less fun to consider is the environmental impact of that travel— an issue that has featured prominently in the news. By traveling in the most carbon-efficient ways, people can reduce the environmental impact of their actions without sacrificing their chance to explore the world in the process.

What it does

Carboniferous takes a source and destination, as well as a maximum cost and time for travel. By combining multiple modes of transport, Carboniferous constructs the lowest carbon-impact trips within the specified cost and time constraints and links the user to directions to access each step. In this way, Carboniferous allows users to see how small changes— like taking a bus to a major airport instead of driving to a local, smaller airport— can reduce their carbon footprint.

By providing carbon costs along with monetary and time costs, the app allows people to choose the balance between convenience and conservation that’s right for them. Carboniferous also provides information about carbon offsetting programs and other ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Rather than enforcing one option as the absolute best, Carboniferous offers the pros and cons of each choice in an easy-to-compare table, putting power in the user’s hands.

How we built it

Carboniferous is built on a React stack with a Python backend. The backend calls into several APIs, including the Google Maps Directions and Distance Matrix APIs, the American Airlines Flight-Engine simulated flight data API, and the Lufthansa Nearest Airports API. Carbon footprints for paths are calculated using standard values for kilograms of carbon released per gallon of gas burned or mile traveled, depending on the means of transportation and the number of people transported.

Challenges we ran into

API request limits: the carbon footprint calculation API we were using has a 20-requests-per-minute limit, and we had to reverse-engineer the calculations it made to remove that dependency
transferring from local hosting to AWS: since the Flight-Engine API has to be hosted on the same server as the backend, this required some careful thought

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team modified the Flight-Engine API to add costs for each flight and add additional airports that American Airlines services, scraping Wikipedia and cross-referencing a dataset of airports. We were able to share this fork with other hack teams, and that additional data -- and the script used to generate it -- is part of a pull request we're making to contribute back to this API.

We’re also proud of building a full stack web app! Our team is two first-time hackers and two hackers who’ve attended but not submitted at previous hackathons, so we’re excited to showcase this project.

What we learned

APIs are plentiful, but not always powerful: we’ll be much more careful about researching an API’s input format and request limits before integrating in the future
Making a general plan helped us stay on track: sketching the tech stack and vision on the first night allowed us to divide labor and stay focused

What's next for Carboniferous

linking to real-life flight data and flight times for more detailed information
factoring departure time into routing
improved communication between frontend and backend: remove heavy limitation on number of requests that can be issued at once

Built With

Submitted to

Hack Arizona
- Winner Fly.Me: Fly cash

Created by

I worked on the backend, including interfacing with the APIs and calculating carbon footprints. I also modified the Flight-Express API, scraping web data for airport names and PRing this updated information into the API repository. I really enjoyed learning more about our stack and getting the chance to dig deep into that API’s data generation!

Amanda Bertsch
I worked on part of the back end for the project. I worked on calculating the carbon, money, and time costs for ground based travels such as via car, bus, or train. I then worked on part of the algorithm that explored the different available paths and chose the most efficient routes. I really enjoyed getting to learn as I used various tools throughout the hackathon

Joseph Acevedo
I'm a junior studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Arizona
I worked on the front-end, aws deployment, front-end back-end integration,

First time deploying a full stack app to aws without extensive help. Used React, Redux, Express, and aws

Amin Sennour
I worked on the backend, front-end back-end integration,and created the video. I helped find and deploy the different API used in the projects as well. First time deploying a full stack.

Mood Gladney