-
Web Demo
-
Weather Tracker Logo
Inspiration Florida is frequently impacted by hurricanes and tropical storms, leading to widespread power outages that affect millions of residents. The unpredictability of these natural disasters and their effects on critical infrastructure inspired the development of a comprehensive website that offers a real-time power outage map.
What It Does The Florida Outage Map provides a centralized platform for residents across all 67 Florida counties to track power outages in real-time. Users can interact with the map, hovering over counties marked with red dots to view the number of outages occurring in each region. This tool helps users stay informed about outages across the state.
How We Built It The Florida Outage Map integrates APIs from official utility companies to retrieve live data, including the number of outages and the affected counties. For cases where APIs were not available, we developed a Python script to gather and process outage information. The frontend of the site was built using PHP to complement the backend Python integration, allowing for seamless communication between the two technologies.
Challenges We Faced One of the main challenges was coordinating our team's diverse skill set. While everyone was familiar with Python, using it on the frontend posed difficulties. This led to significant effort in designing an infrastructure that allowed PHP and Python to work together on the same domain. We also had to navigate the complexities of web scraping and managing real-time data.
Accomplishments We’re Proud Of We successfully built a functional tool that provides real-time outage data for all of Florida’s counties. Our team adapted to new technologies and overcame technical challenges, learning new skills along the way.
What We Learned As first-time hackathon participants, we gained valuable experience in web scraping, mapping APIs, and HTML parsing. We also honed our reverse-engineering skills to retrieve data from sources that didn’t offer public APIs.
What’s Next for the Florida Outage Map Future developments include incorporating crowdsourcing, allowing users to create accounts, log in, and submit live outage reports directly to the platform. Inspired by Google Maps’ live traffic updates, this feature would enhance the map’s accuracy and timeliness. We also plan to add a search function for users to find outage information by county and potentially expand the map’s coverage to include other states, ultimately scaling it to cover the entire United States.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.