19 - Communicar

Carpooling made easy.

Comment

Note for Domain.com Challenge

We registered carpoolwith.tech, since our project allows people to carpool more easily with tech, but our payment method was flagged for security concerns. Domain.com sent an email saying they will get in contact with us within 24 hours which is past the Devpost submission deadline, so we are putting this note here.

Inspiration:

Our goal for this project was to make it easier for people to find and create carpool groups within their community. Rising gas prices and the cost of owning a car have made driving much less accessible to many people in the U.S, and road transport accounts for over 15% of CO2 emissions. This led us to wonder: "How can we make transportation easier for people on a daily basis, while still protecting our environment?" That is how we came up with our idea for this hack.

What it does:

In our website, users can enter their information, such as where they live and where they wish to go. They can then find other people to carpool with, and even email them to organize their carpool. Information available to users include the distance from the user to the homes of other users, when other users leave, and where they go.

How we built it:

To create this project, we used SvelteKit and Firebase, which incorporated HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We also made API calls to determine users' distance from other carpoolers, as well as matplotlib Python visuals.

Challenges we ran into:

Some challenges we ran into while creating this hack was how to manage the database, as well as calculating distance between users. There was a lot of data that had to be stored in the cloud, and so a lot of thought went into data management. It was also difficult to create an efficient solution. We also struggled with some HTML and CSS formatting in the front end, because we were working with some new libraries.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

One accomplishment we are proud of is that we were able to create a working program that addresses multiple important issues in the world. Our program can also be used easily by our immediate community and has a full-fledged account system with a cloud database. We also made the site design very accessible and usable to all by not including distracting or unnecessary elements. Despite being simple, the site is still visually pleasing.

What we learned:

We learned the basics of web development, as well as how to handle data. Most of our team members had never worked on a web app before, and so this was a new experience. A lot of learning was required, especially with styling the site and managing a large number of database entries.

What's next for Communicar:

As for what's next, we hope to make it easier and more efficient when creating carpool groups, and we hope to polish the UI a bit more. Other features we could include are providing more flexibility with inputting the time at which a user leaves and providing more detailed data on the location that they are going to.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates