Bikeshare

A responsive webapp that allows users to donate/sell their bikes.

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Inspiration

There is an enormous amount of unused bicycles left on campus by students. They waste bike parking, and could be used by other students if donated by the people who don't need them anymore. Bike commuting is an effective way of transportation, which also promotes a healthier lifestyle. By donating bikes, the users of this app will also promote reuse and circulation of bikes within RIT's community reducing the environmental impact of RIT's community.

What it does

This webapp allows users to create a post with the bike that they want to get rid of. Instead of just leaving the bike on campus with no owner, the user can choose to donate or sell this bike to another student in the RIT community. A user is asked to provide an image, bike's make and model, type, and year of manufacturing (if known), as well as a brief description of the bike. When the bike is no longer available, the post can be deleted by the user. A post's title and description can be edited at any time, and a different image can be uploaded.

How we built it

Started with simple routes and html views and just kept building on top of that. We used Flask (python), Sqlite3, Bootstrap, Jinja

Challenges we ran into

How to handle image upload. We decided to host everything locally, so the database stores a path to the image as a string, and the actual images are just saved in the project directory after upload.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our app is really light weight and modular. Adding new routes and expanding functionality is very easy due to good modular design. We also love how responsive the website turned out to be on small screens due to Bootstrap.

What we learned

Raman Zatsarenko: Never wrote a backend in Python before. Really enjoyed it. Flask is a nice small library, but allows you to do a lot of things. Radzh Zatsarenko: Mixing Jinja's templates and Bootstrap's classes was pretty fun. Initially I thought about adding some JS to the website as well, but turned out we didn't need it! Never used Jinja before, but Jinja and Boostrap did basically everything we needed.

What's next for Bikeshare

For a webapp of this format making a native mobile app would be an obvious next step. Another thing to add could be using Google Maps to show the location of a particular post (where it's available for pickup). A transaction system to support payment operations between users would also be a good addition.

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