Bike Spotter

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Integration with native Navigation Apps

Inspiration

As UCSB students, we spend much of our day biking from class to class. Given the frequency of use, it happens too frequently that we forget where we park our bikes as we rush through our day. So as we thought about our daily hindrances, this small yet frustrating issue stood out.

What it does

The primary purpose of this app is to passively mark the last location of your bike whenever you leave it. Then, when needed, you can simply open your app, to navigate back to your bike.

How we built it

Upon opening it once, our app will run passively in the background of your device. Using the phone's activity tracker (data from gyro & accelerometer) and GPS location, we determine whether the user is walking, biking, or otherwise. With this information, we can accurately (and very quickly :p) identify when a user is biking and where they parked.

Challenges we ran into

When we started, we thought that we were going to finish much earlier than the deadline. However, every aspect of the app brought new challenges. Some of our greatest obstacles were running the application in the background, even when minimized, and handling permissions on iOS. Tim Cook and Craig Federighi do NOT play around. Both seemingly simple problems proved to be major obstacles to be conquered.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The incorporation of all of these different features into a small app with a clean design made us feel that we truly completed the project. Building an elegant and full-fledged app in less than 36 hours, with varying accessibility and ease-of-life features, was a very big challenge.

What we learned

Out of our team of three, only one of us had had previous experience with app development. For the other two, we learned a great extent of back-end development, middle management, and front-end integration. Additionally, the use of various APIs throughout the project was both extremely fun and educative, despite the hours and hours of headache it caused.

What's next for Bike Spotter

While this app is small, there are still many different ideas that we have to expand the app into an app that every student and staff on UCSB uses. Starting from simple features such as integration into various different assistants, including Siri, Alexa, and Bixby, and layouts of bike density and parking availability, the ideas grow all the way up to advanced integration of AI to analyze travel patterns to recommend future parking locations to minimize time to get to classes and increase the ease of life for students.