Chippy

Inspiration

Our idea is more about economical, sustainable, and reducing our carbon footprint, where we try to find ways for friends to carpool when they are going to the same destination along a similar direction.

What it does

We have people schedule events about when they are leaving for a destination. If it is similar to a friends destination, we allow the user to make a carpooling request to a driver. Once the driver accepts, they then pick up their friend at the requested location.

How we built it

For the frontend, we deployed it on Vercel and used Typescript and React. For the backend, we deployed it on Render and used Typescript and Express. For the database we used TigerDB, and used OpenRouteService for routing and location sharing. To render our map we used Leaflet, using OpenStreetMap data.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we faced is a lack of coordination and preparation for the hackathon. Our team didn't come up with an idea until the end of the team building session. We also had a lack of coordination on how we wanted to distribute and break up tasks so we can work asynchronously. We were also preoccupied by various events throughout the hackathon, and due to the lack of coordination, we didn't have our agents work in the background yet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got a working version deployed to Vercel! One of the team members won the raffle!

What we learned

We learned that planning sufficiently early on goes a long way. Additionally, separating out features and allowing people to work separately will increase productivity a lot.

What's next for Chippy

For Chippy we plan to run a small private pilot with friend groups before turning it into a startup. We want to see how people use and interact with the app, how convenient it is for our beta testers, and see if Chippy needs more work on certain features or add new features.

Through our private pilot, we can gain valuable telemetry to improve features such as route estimates, and pickup coordination; while still keeping Chippy's core purpose, helping friend groups coordinate carpools conveniently, reducing emissions, and maintain their privacy.