Eco Advisor

Inspiration

Our team was inspired by seeing the negative impacts of modern-day carbon emissions and wanting to find ways to reduce our own individual environmental impact.

What it does

The Eco Advisor is a user-friendly, location-based app used to provide options for how people can reduce their carbon footprint–by using Citibikes instead of other less sustainable modes of transportation or by utilizing recycle and compost centers instead of letting perfectly reusable trash go to the landfill. There is an additional feature to view air quality in your area as well.

How we built it

We were inspired by this Google Maps Travel Companion application and used Java React, Google Cloud, and several different APIs (https://rapidapi.com/eskerda/api/city... and https://rapidapi.com/weatherbit/api/a...) to make a functional page for Eco Advisor with dropdown menus and a navigable map. We also worked with Figma and implemented several "flows" to create a prototype of how we'd like the app to function once fully developed.

Challenges we ran into

Our team definitely faced many challenges in this project due to the natural time constraints of the hackathon. We had to get a lot of help from mentors and users on StackOverflow about GitHub, since all of us had very limited experience with how to initialize repositories, "push" and "pull" changes in the code, and run our app so it displays correctly. We also did not get to program all the features in the application that we initially wanted to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Because this was our first time hacking, our team is extremely proud of the dedication and commitment we showed while powering through the project (even when we got "stuck" on a problem and had to spend a large amount of time figuring it out). Despite starting out with little knowledge of most of the technologies we used, by the end, we had a functioning webpage with an embedded Google Map that we were able to style according to our taste and the theme of Social Good!

What we learned

We think the most important aspect of a hackathon is taking the opportunity of the themed project to have fun collaborating with friends and learn as much about new technologies as you can. Even if you discover that the time limit doesn't allow you to have a "perfect product" by the end, you can at least create some working ideas and a visualization of a meaningful project you can continue developing later.

What's next for Eco Advisor

Our team would like to continue fleshing out the possibilities for different eco-friendly resources to be added to the map as well as the opportunity to interact with the locations on the map extensively (include details about the availability of bikes, pickup times for the bins, etc. ).