Inspiration
As a team we wanted to make a program that would have an impact on the world we live in. Carbon emissions have a big impact on the planet and we usually hear about big corporations and whole nations but it all begin with us as individuals. We wanted our application to not only spread awareness on our carbon footprint but also for user to visualize their individual emissions. In the age of social media we wanted to create a way for friends to see our impact and maybe even showoff how low of an impact you have on the environment! This could help incentivize people to at least be more conscious and maybe think twice before you drive instead of taking the bus.
What it does
The application in theory is a web application that asks the user a few questions about their lifestyle to calculate their carbon emissions. It stores this data for visualization and aggregates others to see how you rank against others.
How we built it
We built a web interface for the user using bootstrap html to ask for the customer input with python flask to send data to backend. The backend features a rough ETL pipeline. We used python flask to extract the user information from the web interface. We then created a python script to make the calculations based of the data received. We loaded the data using python and psycopg2 to load data into a PostgreSQL for storage of the data of all users.
Challenges we ran into
We had lots of issues with our environments, we all had different levels of experience with git and GitHub. We had issues with css and html causing us to scrap the css from the website. We struggled with ideas at first but once we set our sights to a goal we were good to go.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
From strangers to teammates, we have overcame and accomplished a lot in the last 24 hours. Throughout this process we had member learn new languages such as python and bootstrap and we had members learn new frameworks including flask. we also learned how to push and pull data from Github as well as creating an ssh key. With all these small accomplishments, we were able to create our website to raise awareness and can view our own carbon emissions as well.
What we learned
We learned more about working as part of a team by pair programming and helping each other with debugging. We learned about different python frameworks and utilizing python for web development. We learned about databases and the data life cycle. We learned about html and user interfaces by using bootstrap.
What's next for Carbon Emissions Calculator
Next we will finish the web interface, create a visualization dashboard. In the long run the application would be shared with others to aggregate more data to visualize.
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