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Home Screen: Choose a mode (find parking spot or give up spot)
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Selection: User is shown areas to select from.
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Selection: User has selected a parking lot he or she wishes to park in.
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Waiting: User is waiting for a matching student.
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On The Way: The user is waiting for the other student to pick him or her up.
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In Progress: The user has been picked up by the other student to be taken to his or her parking spot.
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Completion: User has arrived at his or her destination and may complete the journey.
Inspiration
The inspiration for this project was provoked by the continuous, hopeless parking spots in the college campus. Every year, great new students arrive, and yet, the number of parking spots seem to dwindle. Its an uphill battle against real estate! Hence, this application is for students by students to aid in their every college-day life, by minimizing the time wasted in the Battle of the Spots, circa 1pm daily.
What it does
The app has two distinct options: request a parking spot or request a ride to your parking spot. For the first option, you enlist in a queue of students waiting for a parking spot, whereas the second option, it is for students leaving the campus that could use a ride to their vehicle in exchange for their parking spot. The application matches students based on distance-proximity: each leaving student is paired with an arriving student.
How we built it
For the front end, we utilized React-Native for a quicker GUI setup and cross-platform capabilities, and used socket.io-client to interact with the server. As for the back end, we resorted to socket.io + node.js for the networking aspect of the application, where we built a server and client architecture. Furthermore, Heroku was the perfect choice for the server as it's simple to configure and is highly accessible.
Challenges we ran into
React-Native was NOT too friendly.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
As always, we strive to experiment in new technologies at every hackathon we attend. Stepping into the unknown is one of our favorite methods of expediting our knowledge: we picked up an unfamiliar programming language and combined it with a complex library to achieve our goals.
What I learned
How to deploy servers onto Heroku. Come up with a plan. Stick to the plan. Throw the plan, cause all hell breaks loose.
What's next for Spot Swap
With a dedication to save time, finding parking spots would be something of the past. Thus, we plan to generalize the application for more universities, malls, and essentially every parking spot. Also, implement a more secure layer of security for our users.
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