Inspiration
I'm a casual Pokemon Go player, and was inspired by that game to create a more "real-life version" of the game.
NOTE: This is made for mobile!
What it does
- You can log in with Google, but I didn't prioritize it so logging in doesn't do anything :(
- Check species that are native to your location
- Upload species that you find into your personal collection!
- Check out your very cool collection that is not personal because I wasn't able to get individual accounts working in time :D
NOTE: MongoDB doesn't seem to be working on my published website :( but it does work locally. Also, the domain.com URL is not redirecting to the correct IP address, so I put the IP of my website as well down below.
How I built it
This project uses a MERN stack! It uses a React.js frontend, Express.js backend and MongoDB Atlas database. It uses the NatureServer rest API to get the local native species, and its hosted on an AWS EC2 instance.
Challenges I ran into
Waay too many. My main challenge was that this was my first time using MongoDB Atlas, so getting it to work was a huge challenge for me, especially since I haven't worked with any databases before. Also, there isn't a decent plant API that gives you native plants according to your location! I opted to use NatureServe's rest API and show the user the native plants in his/her state. The documentation for this wasn't very clear, and I spent a few hours troubleshooting criteria part of my post request that supposedly was supposed to work, but didn't. I'm not very fluent in React or Node, so I learned a lot more about those. I just spent two hours trying to set a React component's state to an image... I'm so sure I did it right, but it wouldn't work. I gave up on manually doing it and downloaded a package that did it for me. Another challenge was publishing the website on an AWS EC2 instance. Actually I'm still struggling on that... the website loads, but the mongodb functions don't seem to work...
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I got everything to work together! Although it the MongoDB functions only work locally for some reason...
What I learned
MongoDB Atlas... but not really. And many tidbits in React and Node and Express.
What's next for Wild Walk
Maybe a live map. To be honest, since there are over 6000 species in New Jersey alone, it would be very impractical to follow in Pokemon Go's footsteps. I would probably hardcode the things to discover, like... common species? So like common trees are oak, maple, etc, while rarer trees would be dogwood or something. I'm not too sure...
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