SustainaBottle

(See comments on bottom for Video Demo Link!)

Inspiration

While choosing to use a refillable water bottle instead of using plastic water bottles may feel like a small and insignificant choice, in reality, the effect this has on our environment is astronomical: An estimate of 60 million plastic water bottles ends up in landfills per day.

We decided to make an app that allows you to visually track how many plastic water bottles you are saving by choosing to refill your water bottle. Not only does this promote sustainability in our environment, but the app also keeps track of how much you drink daily, improving your water drinking habits.

What it does

SustainaBottle accepts input from the user in how many oz, mL, or L of water they have consumed since their last entry in the app, and the app keeps track of this information. In the Main Menu, the number of plastic water bottles you saved in total, so that you can see the positive environmental impact that you, personally, are having on the world.

In the Stats menu, you can see how much water you have consumed on the current day. A daily goal of 8 cups encourages healthy water drinking habits. There are also multiple achievements to obtain that make drinking water a fun and rewarding experience--literally!

In the Settings menu, SustainaBottle accepts a phone number and a time you want to remember to refill your reusable water bottle. The app then uses Twilio to send you a reminder notification at this exact time. No more forgetting to refill your water bottle!

How we built it

We built it using the Python programming language, specifically using Tkinter as our GUI. We also integrated Twilio in order to send refill reminder notifications to the user's phone number. We used GitHub to smoothly collaborate with each other while programming this app.

Challenges we ran into

We initially had difficulty with being too ambitious with our program. We wanted to add many other features such as background customization and stickers, but we simply did not have time to implement this on top of the core functionality of program, given that we only had 24 hours to create this app from scratch. We had to learn how to prioritize our core features while also having enough fun features (ex. achievements) that make our app feel fresh and unique.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of how we integrated Twilio as one of our main features in our project functionality. We had never implemented something like this before into one of our programming projects, so it was challenging to learn how to implement it within the limited time frame we had. However, once we got it to work, we felt accomplished and proud of ourselves knowing that our app is much more complex, useful, and user-friendly with this functionality.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate Twilio into our app as well as improve our Python code organization and Tkinter skills. We also spent time studying attractive and user-friendly GUI, and we used our observations to improve SustainaBottle's own GUI.

What's next for SustainaBottle

We would like to implement weekly, monthly, and yearly water drinking tracking on top of the daily tracking we have under the Stats menu. Additionally, we would like to add a way to customize the background of the Main Menu with different colors and stickers in order to make the app experience feel uniquely your own.

As a more advanced improvement, we would like to implement inter-user integration where you can compare your plastic water bottles saved and water drinking stats with your friends through leaderboards, etc.