Cinder

It's a car pool suggestion system for people that commute to work. The idea is to find people along your daily commute that you can carpool with.

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Inspiration

The effects of global warming are continually worsening as we speak. The carbon emissions produced by our vehicles are playing a huge part in contributing to this effect. Many individuals take the same route to and from work on a daily basis, and could help lessen the effects of global warming by carpooling with individuals who take similar routes to and from work. However, currently, there aren't any platforms which allow individuals to find other people to they could carpool with.

What it does

Our program matches the user with other users who take similar route to their workplace. It's like tinder, but for carpooling. When people sign up to use cinder, they provide their start destination and work destination, and the program will match them other users who they could potentially carpool with. It shows them how their commute would change to accommodate for additional stops.

How we built it

We built a web application using react.js to set up the client side, and express.js and node.js to set up the server side. MongoDBwas used to set up our database.

Challenges we ran into

Due to authentication problems, updating the database and connecting the client side code to the server presented significant challenges. Apart from that, though, we were able to use the Google Maps mapping API to plot the locations and routes in real time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

During the course of making cinder we implemented the google map API with places, geolocation and routes enabled. This allowed us to calculate distances and commute duration between two places in real time and also plot routes on the map. Furthermore, we made a database using MongoDB to store all the login information of our users. The passwords were also kept with a certain level of security through hashing. The frontend used react.js and we used axiom to retrieve information from our database.

What we learned

We got a deeper understanding of react js and gained experience with frontend development. Javascript was a language most of our members did not know much about but through creating and implementing this project we gained good command over the language. Furthermore, we also understood how to sort and work with a database. This project helped us gain confidence in web app development.

What's next for Cinder

We need to debug the authentication problems with our database. I think the next step would be to gather feedback from users regarding any other statistics which would be useful to display when they are planning their carpool.

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