Cyke | Devpost

Inspiration

We noticed that a lot of people don't know what's recyclable. Some people recycle what shouldn't be and many people recycle much less than they could. We wanted to find a way to improve recycling habits while also incentivizing people to recycle more. Cyke, pronounced psych,(psyched about recycling) was the result.

What it does

Psych is a platform to get users in touch with local recycling facilities, to give recycling facilities more publicity, and to reward users for their good actions.

For the user: When a user creates an account for Cyke, their location is used to tell them what materials are able to be recycled and what materials aren't. Users are given a Cyke Card which has their rank. When a user recycles, the amount they recycled is measured and reported to Cyke, which stores that data in our CochroachDB database. Then, based on revenue share from recycling plants, users would be monetarily rewarded. The higher the person's rank, the more they receive for what they recycle. There are four ranks, ranging from "Learning" to "Superstar."

*For Recycling Companies: * For a recycling company to be listed on our website, they must agree to a revenue share corresponding to the amount of material recycled (can be discussed). This would be in return for guiding customers towards them and increasing traffic and recycling quality. Cyke provides companies with an overview of how well recycling is going: statistics over the past month or more, top individual contributors to their recycling plant, and an impact score relating to how much social good they've done by distributing money to users and charities. Individual staff members can also be invited to the Cyke page to view these statistics and other more detailed information.

How we built it

Our site uses a Node.JS back-end, with ejs for the server-side rendering of pages. The backend connects to CockroachDB to store user and company information, recycling transactions, and a list of charities and how much has been donated to each.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges mostly with CockroachDB, one of us was able to successfully create a cluster and connect it via the MacOS terminal, however when it came to connecting it to our front-end there is existed a lot of issues with getting the right packages for the linux CLI as well as for connecting via our connection string. We spent quite a few hours on this as using CockroachDB serverless was an essential part of hosting info about our recyclers, recycling companies, transactions, and charities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of getting CockroachDB to function properly. For two of the three members on the team this was our first time using a Node.js back-end, so it was difficult and rewarding to complete. On top of being proud of getting our SQL database off the ground, we’re proud of our design. We worked a lot on the colors. We are also proud of using the serverless form of CockroachDB so our compute cluster is hosted google's cloud platform (GCP).

What we learned

Through some of our greatest challenges came some of our greatest learning advances. Through toiling through the CockroachDB and SQL table, of which none of us had previous experience with before, we learned a lot about environment variables and how to use express and pg driver to connect front-end and back-end elements.

What's next for Cyke

To scale our solution, the next steps involve increasing the personalization aspects of our application. For users that means, adding in capabilities that highlight local charities for users to donate to, and locale-based recycling information. On the company side, there are optimizations that can be made around the information that we provide them, thus improving the impact score to consider more factors like how consistent their users are.