CarDoc

Inspiration

Keeping track of all the maintenance a car needs can be a real daunting task especially for those of us that know nothing about cars. This is particularly challenging since different cars have different maintenance needs. And don’t even get us started on tracking manufacturer recalls! Thus, we were inspired to build this web-based tool to help make people’s lives easier by providing a tailored list of required maintenance items and recalls for almost any car!

What it does

Allows the user to create different car profiles in their home dashboard by submitting the year, make, and model of their vehicles. The user can then view the vehicles’ profile pages individually which display any required maintenance and recalls due based on the mileage of the selected car. The tool also allows the user to complete maintenance items and move them to a completed section.

How we built it

This project was built using Python, Flask, SQLite, HTML/CSS, and Bootstrap. We also used carMD’s Vehicle maintenance API to access the recall and maintenance items required for each car.

Challenges we ran into

There was an instance where one of our GitHub branches became corrupted somehow and caused a plethora of issues when attempting to run the program with that iteration. We were lucky to each have a copy of the project on our local machines and a robust commit history and used a working version to create a new branch and work off of. We abandoned the corrupted branch and never looked back. Our group also didn’t have much experience with Flask so we had to learn to use it to render pages and dynamically populate rows as well as submit forms. This was one of the most challenging things we encountered and the first time for many of us where we connected the front end to the back end! We also ran into a problem with displaying the recalls. There wasn't enough time to fix it before submitting the project but it will be done soon after.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Being the first time most of worked on a full-stack app, there were cheers of joy when we first successfully wrote a function for our one of our routes that dynamically rendered content on our web browser. The biggest accomplishment was coming together as a group and using the knowledge we gathered individually at OSU to build something without following a tutorial or instructor-led orientation.

What we learned

We learned how to work as a group and navigate git. We also learned to use Flask and Bootstrap to quickly build a functional application. Most of us had seen HTML and CSS before but had not practiced in many years so it was a valuable relearning experience.

What's next for APP

We would like to add user authentication functionality to the app so users can save their information have exclusive access to it. We also would like to allow users to edit existing vehicles, and also ignore or reschedule service for a later date. We would also like to include a feature that allows the user to upload a picture of their car to be displayed in that vehicle’s profile page. We will also be fixing the recalls section to display the recalls since there was a bug that we couldn't fix before the submission deadline.