Plate Finder

Inspiration

One of our team members was frustrated that the parking in their residence hall was all taken despite her paying for a parking pass and spot already. Many unauthorized parkers were taking spots that were not theirs. So, to combat this issue, we wanted to create a service to prevent this kind of behavior by providing limited free parking and a timer to track how long people can park.

What it does

Our web app allows users to register an account and input their vehicle information and license plate to add their vehicle to the database. Registering a vehicle will give the user 3 free hours of parking for that vehicle, and the site displays a timer showing it. A user can also search the database via license plate to see if their vehicle is in the database, search for other license plates, or see how much free parking they have left.

How we built it

We built the app using php, html, css, and javascript. Our IDE of choice was VSCode. We did all our database handling on php. We hosted our website on infinityfree and copied our files to it.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a variety of challenges, especially when implementing the php part of the app since none of us had any experience with it. However, the biggest of those was the registering and logging in system because we had to learn POST-REDIRECT-GET.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of setting up a working account system that tracks the log in session of the user. We were also able to create a database of license plates that can be added to via the web app. When a license plate is found in the search, we were able to display the user, their plate, and time remaining successfully, which took lots of problem solving.

What we learned

We learned how to implement a database using php, as this was our first experience doing any kind of implementation like this. We learned how to store new information in the database, how to find the stored information in the database, and how to remove it.

What's next for Plate Finder

What's next for Plate Finder is that we will add a fees system where users will have to pay fees if they do not move their vehicle out of their parking spot after the 3 hours of given free parking. Also we would add notifications to alert the user once their time has ran out to park. and a subscription service that allows greater parking access and extended parking periods for a monthly fee.