SeismicSafe

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Inspiration

Living in California, there's no shortage of earthquake occurrences. That being said, it's something that everyone should be prepared for in the case of a severe event. Majority of the time after an earthquake occurs we're left wondering if we'd actually just experienced that or it's just in our heads before quickly opening up local news or Twitter to see if anyone else felt that shake too. With our app, we want everyone to be able to stay in the loop when an earthquake occurs without having to guess and look for confirmation from social media reactions. Not everyone has access to social media and if they do, not everyone is following a local earthquake bot.

What it does

SeismicSafe notifies users of earthquake occurrences near their specified location with the ultimate goal of improving and promoting community safety. When users sign up for SeismicSafe, they're prompted to enter only their phone number and current city. With this information, we make requests to the USGS API to gather updated earthquake data so that we can send out messages to our users based on where they are located. To minimize the number of messages sent out since there are many earthquake occurrences around the world, we limit messages to be sent based on magnitude level (typically 4 and up). Also, depending on the magnitude level, we tailor our text message to include different safety and potential emergency tips to provide users with not just simple earthquake info but also ways in which they can stay safe and help those around them.

How we built it

We used Node.js and Express.js for our backend routing and used Wix's Velo platform to create our frontend application. We sourced data from the USGS API for real time earthquake information and utilized the Twilio API for user phone number verification during sign up as well as sending SMS messages for local earthquake occurrences. For our backend database, we decided to utilize Firebase Firestore for quick integration. To plan our our project, we divided tasks and kept track of tasks using Trello. To complete our wireframe and understand how our frontend would look and feel we utilized Figma.

Challenges we ran into

It was our team's second ever hackathon and we started a bit late since we were trying to understand how things worked and get into the groove of things. Spent a lot of time researching the backend to understand how to request earthquake data from the USGS API and integrate Firebase as this is our first time using this database application. Although our website is complete and linked to our domain, we still need to figure out how to link our backend to our Wix Velo site.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this was our first time using Wix Velo, we're proud that we were successfully able to create our frontend exactly to the way we planned it on Figma. Also as first time users of Firebase, we successfully were able to link our project to our Firestore database.

What we learned

We learned a lot about new technologies we could use for future projects such as Wix Velo, Firebase, and Twilio. Excited to take this experience and work with these technologies again soon!

What's next for SeismicSafe

Our team looks to continue finishing up our project and looking to find ways to improve community safety. We'd love for this to be something that people can use and feel safe using in the future! Glad to be getting closer to building out our ideas and learning new technologies along the way.