BetterRoute

A project that calculates the amount of carbon emitted by any single car ride someone takes. This was created in Python alongside google maps API.

Comment

BetterRoute

Inspiration

We were inspired by apps that spread awareness about carbon emissions in this world. We wanted to contribute to this by making our own application. We wanted to show how much carbon emissions come out of a car and make people aware of their personal carbon footprint.

What it does

Simply put, it calculates the amount of carbon emitted by the user's car on a particular route. The user puts in their start and end destination of a route they took/are planning to take, and information about their car to calculate the amount of carbon emitted during that trip.

How we built it

We built the font-end using simple HTML. We built the back end using Python. We used data about cars and their emissions stored in .csv files to parse and make numpy arrays that contain information we can work with. We then took the user's input about their car and route, used it to find the carbon emissions of that car in grams per mile and the distance of their route. Using those two things we calculate the total carbon emitted on that trip.

Challenges we overcame

We ran into soooo many challenges as beginners at out first ever hackathon.

  1. Time: We severely underestimated the time it would take us to finish this project.
  2. Front-End: Hey, does anybody on our team know how to do front-end stuff?
  3. APIs: Since this was our first time working with the google maps API we had trouble using it in our own project

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For our first ever hackathon, we were able to present a fully working project! We learnt how to do front-end work for the first time and were able to build a functioning website from scratch.

What we learned

We learnt a lot from this experience.

  1. Time management.
  2. Working with APIs.
  3. Basics of Front-End development ~4. How to stay up late at night~

What's next for BetterRoute

The next steps to scale-up our project would be to take the amount of carbon emitted and contextualising it using graphics or real-world examples to help people better understand about their impact on the planet.

Share this project:

Updates