Inspiration
I wanted to create a carpooling app that could help reduce carbon footprints for events. The idea came from hearing about a zero waste convention. The participants sacrifice their time, money, comfort, and convenience to make choices to save the world, but then a portion of their commitment is lost on the travel to the convention.
What it does
Admin creates an event
Participants give their address, car, and other preferences
Admin calculates who should pick up who in the carpool to reduce the carbon footprint
Admin (off app) assigns drivers their passengers
Other features
Surreptitious Isolation - Admin can quietly exclude driver to drive by themselves for safety
Shows kg of carbon saved on trip
Shows participants 'Trees planted' equivalent over all carpools
How we built it
It was build with Antigravity and MongoDB Atlas. The backend is fastAPI and the frontend is Vite React. It was started with an MVP very early on and features were added one at a time.
Challenges we ran into
The vehicle routing initially went way to far out of the way to carpool, refusing to let drivers be passengers, but communicating to Antigravity it was able to fix it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One situation that was pretty funny was Antigravity did not close the fastAPI server correctly before an update. Then for about 5 minutes it tried 'kill -9...' and 'pkill -9' to try to kill the process, but struggled to find the right process. It was very relatable. I am proud that a artificial intelligence struggled with the same thing I have struggled with sooo many times.
I am very happy with the product. I am very happy that is is made in a way that it can cheaply and easily be modified to meet a variety of clients needs.
What we learned
My experience has been Ruby on Rails, Vue, and Postgres. I have learned a lot about other technologies and how well they work even being much smaller then the previous stacks I have used.
What's next for EcoRoute
- A feature that compares time of your carpool compared public transportation in the participants area
- Store more information so the next time a participant uses EcoRoute it can auto populate a lot of the information
- Create a participant page with badges
- Talk with potential User and see what they would like
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.