Car-Bon

Inspiration

In recent years, we've seen the Earth's climate rapidly change. One of the leading causes is the passenger vehicle: cars and trucks account for almost 1/5th of the United States' carbon emissions. According to the United Nations, carbon emissions need to be reduced by 7.6% every single year until 2030 to prevent irreversible climate change. Our team has decided to create Car-Bon, an app that tracks a user's driving route and automatically calculates the carbon levels emitted from a trip.

What it does

Allows a user to create an account with driving information such as MPG and fuel type.
Track's a user's location and evaluates the distance of their route.
Calculates the carbon levels emitted from a drive.
Visualizes the user's weekly carbon emissions and provides a history and overview of recent trips.

How we built it

When the user starts tracking, Car-Bon will begin detecting the user's location and calculating the distance travelled. After the trip is completed, Car-Bon will automatically store trip specific data such as cumulative distance and waypoints in Google Firestore. With the data stored in Google Firestore, Car-Bon can retrieve a user's past carbon footprint, recent trips and plot the route on an embedded Google Map.

Challenges we ran into

Our team's first attempt at both creating a mobile app and working with Google Firebase.
Organizing the UI to make it look decent took lots of trial and error.
Testing the app was difficult since only one of us had an Android and it required us to drive with the built app on a device.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Developing a fully functional application that met our initial goals.
Becoming proficient in querying from Google Firestore.
Practiced good design principles.

What's next for Car-Bon

Integrating Bluetooth to automatically detect when a user is connected to their car, eliminating the need of starting tracking.
Offering Google Map's most fuel efficient and eco friendly routes as an alternative once it's available on their API.