Inspiration
Both of our teammates had experienced moving before. We know how expensive and stressful it can be to attempt to figure out the best, most inexpensive way to get where you are going, so we wanted to build a calculator that can measure the actual cost of different moving trucks and find the best solution.
What it does
Our program returns two values. The first is the expected gas price of moving from one place to another. The second is the expected price of a specific moving truck based on the kind of moving truck, the starting location, the finishing location, the brand of the moving truck, and the date. These two values are combined to help pick the best price.
How we built it
We built our program using gasbuddy.com to find the average gas price and the Geopy Python library to find the distance between the two given cities. We used the Selenium library and Uhaul’s website to get Uhaul’s estimate directly and then calculate the total price based on the miles. Additionally, we used resources such as https://www.pricelisto.com/prices/penske-rental to find the price of other popular moving trucks and moving truck companies.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge we ran into was trying to build a GUI. We originally wanted to use PyGame, but it turns out our PyGame is horrible for user input. So, after struggling, we decided to remove the whole UI other than the dropdown menu.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The accomplishment we are most proud of is our ability to put user input into U-Haul’s website and get the result of their calculation. Then, we mix this with our calculation to find the total price. Initially, we thought this would be impossible since pulling the source after the calculation did not seem to work. However, we found that by copying all of the data and pasting it into a variable, we could make a program to find the calculation results.
What we learned
We learned much more about data scraping and Python. Only one member of our team was experienced in python, so the other member had a lot to learn in a short amount of time. We also learned a lot about acquiring user input and applying it efficiently.
What's next for Move It Pro
Our next goals for Move It Pro are to develop an actual graphical interface with a different language or library that allows for simpler user input than PyGame. Additionally, we would like to add more truck companies and a comparison output to find the cheapest option out of the available companies easily.
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