Inspiration
Have you ever spent 30+ minutes hunting for a parking space in a busy city such as Seattle, San Fransico, or even New York City? This will be a never ending problem as our cities become busier and our population grows.
What it does
CloudParking is an app which allows you to rent parking spaces. On the flip side, CloudParking Spot enables users to rent out their property as a parking space. These two apps are essential for people who live in busy cities such as Seattle, San Fransisco, and New York City.
How I built it
CloudParking is an Android app built in Android Studios with Java and Google Map's API. The two apps communicate through an online MySQL database on our servers using PHP.
Challenges I ran into
Since this was our first time attempting to creating two fully functioning apps, we ran into many difficulties including Google's GeoCoder API's quota, Java Async (passing variables), Connecting to the MySQL server, Google Map's API Markers.
Google's GeoCoder API
GeoCoder is a project by Google which allows you to lookup coordinates from an address, this allows us to pinpoint a marking within the Google Map API. Although we were able to get GeoCoder to work, we had hit the max request quota which prevented us from using it.
Java Async
As this was our first time working with Async in Java, we ran into many problems passing variables between classes. We ended up changing the Async class into an inner class with a callback.
MySQL server
We had issues using PHP to connect to our MySQL server. This was resolved with careful trial and error.
Google Map's API Markers
Google Map's API Marker only accepts coordinates, we had issues with accurately placing the markers in the correct location. Through farther research and trial error, we were able to fix this problem.
Accomplishments that We're proud of
We are extremely proud and happy to be able to create two apps which communicated with each other through a MySQL server. We are happy with our idea and hope to pursue and farther improve these apps in the future.
What's next for CloudParking
CloudParking is extremely scalable. One example is using CloudParking with IoT sensors in shopping mall parking lots. The IoT sensor devices would a camera which reads the license place and automatically bills the driver through their CloudParking account.
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