Inspiration
The world of car spotting is huge, and a significant amount of those who participate in this exciting hobby can earn some significant rewards from their video blogs and photography. We created a platform that allows this global community of car spotters more easily and conveniently share what they do with the world and to enable other aspiring car spotters to join in on the fun.
To provide a proof of concept within a 24-hour time span, we've decided to focus on one popular field of car spotting: exotic cars.
What it does
Users can easily pin their location along with the manufacturer and model (if applicable) of an exotic car that they saw through their Pebble Smartwatch or an Android application. Other car spotters can then pull up a synced map powered by Esri from within the Android application to more conveniently plan their next spotting adventure.
How we built it
We built a Pebble Watchapp that allows a user to easily select the model and manufacturer (if applicable) of the exotic car they. Once the model is chosen, it calls the Esri API to post a pin within a map at the user's current location. We also developed an Android application, which displays this Esri map and all the pins marked.
Challenges we ran into
Being completely new to Android development, our Android developer faced an abundance of roadblocks during development. In addition, our entire team was new to the Esri API, so familiarizing ourselves with the necessary components proved to be quite a challenge, especially within the Android application. Likewise, no one had developed for the Pebble Smartwatch before and having used Pebble's latest beta SDK called Pebble.js, which is a new framework that allows development completely in JavaScript instead of the native C environment, our Pebble Watchapp developer had to explore a variety of approaches to integrate JavaScript components that are usually supported by the native language but isn't in the Pebble environment.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We have a working proof of concept. Although our Pebble Watchapp developer has been to 2 hackathons before, this project was a 1st-time submission for all 3 of us.
What I learned
We learned a lot of Pebble, Android, and back-end APIs. Our entire team was generally unfamiliar with all of these technologies, and learning it on-the-spot within 24 hours proved to be both challenging and fun.
What's next for Carmmunity
We bonded during the hackathon and we ended up spitting out ideas that made us believe in a vision beyond our initial proof of concept. Besides completing our initial design and polishing the UI, we see ourselves taking the next step to provide additional features, such as heat mapping to display hot spots for car spotting based on historical data points and using artificial intelligence to automatically identify the make, model, and color of a car simply by taking a photo of it. In addition, we see this project expanding into yet another global community, hence the name Carmmunity, and providing a platform for other genres of car spotters to join in on the action.
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