Carbon E-Mission

Imagine your own car talking with you about how it impacts this planet. With our tracker, it will help you track, monitor, and understand your own impact on Earth, cruising towards a healthier future.

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Inspiration

Normally when we talk about "saving the planet" we rally up, muster some words, do a day's worth of "saving" and it ends there. We are pretty sure everyone acknowledges it as a serious situation and for those who don't, we need to make them aware that it is. People may give a speech or two, inspiring us to help save the planet, but it was never on a personal level. We want to make it personal. We want you to personally know how much you contribute to carbon emissions. Cars are the number one mediator for these emissions and we know how important they are. For most of us, daily life is very difficult without them. But we still need awareness. We need to know how much we emit when we travel in cars.

What it does

Our product the Carbon E-Mission is a GPS device that lets you know how much carbon emission you emit based on the make and model of your car. It uses a database and calculates the amount of emissions based on trips. Its is cumulative and resets every day, letting you know how much you emitted throughout the week.

How we built it

We used a Neo-6M GPS with an ESP32 DEVKIT V1. We also used an SD card module to store data like longitude and latitude for the post-processing calculations. It took a lot of learning to make all the hardware work together but we did it in the end.

Challenges we ran into

A couple of challenges that we ran into were the limitation of a weak antenna that we needed to work with our GPS module. Due to multiple electromagnetic waves coming from different devices in our environment and originally stationed inside the ballroom, to get the GPS to work, we needed to go outside. We also ran into a bunch of issues regarding not knowing the documentation for the platforms we were using to code since this is a new experience for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud that we solved the antenna issue. It was by far the biggest issue and took the most time. It was such a difficult task due to the antenna's magnitude of strength and it being worked on outside. We are also very proud of how far we got with the two of us, as we had a relatively polished product in the end that performed its main functions.

What we learned

We now better understand how to deal with microcontrollers and its components. The whole IDEAhacks environment. was exhilarating and helped us gain a newfound understanding of working under pressure. This made us pull 2 all-nighters, as we underestimated the amount of knowledge needed for what we wanted to accomplish. It was overall a good experience and helped us gain a lot of knowledge on in-the-moment engineering.

What's next for Carbon E-Mission

Carbon E-Mission has a bright future with a lot of potential. It can have a system like friendly competitions in weekly rankings against friends so it will keep it entertaining. Also, we would hope to integrate it with other application services and not just retain it to IOS.

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