DeCarbonUs

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Inspiration

As per UN reports, Climate change affects every country in the world. Carbon emission has become a menace to our planet. With increasing levels of CO2 emissions, 800 million people, Eleven percent of the world’s population are currently vulnerable to climate change impacts. Each year more frequent and intense drought, storms, heatwaves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and warming oceans directly harm animals, destroy the places they live, and wreak havoc on people's livelihoods and communities. CO2 emissions from human activities have caused the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere to go up from around 275 parts per million (ppm) before the industrial revolution to over 410 in 2020, A 50 % increase. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere, as of July 2021, 416 ppm, is the highest in human history. Being passionate about climate change, we wanted to build a solution for our community that will help them monitor and reduce their carbon footprint. To fight for our planet we came up with the idea of DeCarbonUs.

What it does

DeCarbonUs is an App-based solution to help fight climate change by facilitating individuals to reduce and control their carbon footprint. With our app, the user can easily monitor and analyze how their daily activities contribute to carbon emissions and how they can take measures to slowly reduce such contributing factors by taking simple steps. With the help of a pie chart, the users get a thorough idea of its contributions in different categories such as eating preferences, traveling habits, fuel consumption, etc. To help create a community of like-minded individuals where they can share their ideas and work, we added Naturegram, an inbuilt social media platform that lets users connect. A user profile is created where the user can post pictures and follow their friends and new people to stay connected with what is happening in the community worldwide! The users can get daily updates about the local environment-friendly events happening nearby with our feature 'Maps' that shows the live location of such events happening in the community. With the help of the wide variety of tracks provided for Carbon Footprint minimization will help the user to manage their activities to reduce their Carbon Footprint.

How we built it

Our app’s frontend is mainly built on flutter & dart because it offers fast and easy cross platform development, On the backend side we are using firebase for cloud storage and authentication. For calculating the total estimated carbon emission based upon the user’s input, we are sending the responses to our custom-built REST API built using Nodejs and Express written in JavaScript and deployed on Google Cloud Platform. The API which serves the latest blogs on climate changes or carbon footprint is also called from the app to the same API which we are using for calculating the estimated carbon emission. The Maps section which shows recent community events is powered by google maps API from GCP. The location of the user is extracted from the device location services. Device dependent features like camera, datetime is accessed through native APIs. Tools we used for developing our app was mainly Android Studio, VS Code, GitHub, and Postman for API Testing

Challenges we ran into

Although we faced main challenges but to summarize our experience, the first challenge we faced was to make the app user-friendly i.e., providing a good UI/UX. To tackle this issue, we took inspiration from various platforms like dribble, Behance and did a continuous development and testing upon the user interface. Second issue which we faced was to make the app fast and small, although our app is built using flutter which provides great performance, but we still needed to extract tiny bit of performance from the app, so we tested our app using DartdevTools and did CPU Profiling and size analysis which helped us to make the app even faster and smaller in size. Other issue which we encountered was to make the API responses in the app as fast as possible as no user likes to wait while the app data gest loaded. For the serve-side, deploying the API on GC was the best idea to improve the API calls and within the app we made sure to load the API data well in advance so that user doesn’t have to wait for the data to get loaded Hence improving user Experience

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we managed to complete the whole project in such a short time span and managed to include all the features and USPs that we initially planned to incorporate. It was a great learning experience for us while building this application.

What we learned

We got to learn how to work as a team, each team member required to work on different aspects of the project. Also we learnt many new technical concepts which ere new to us while developing the solution

What's next for DeCarbonUs

Although we tried our level best to include all the important features required in this app, but there is always a scope of improvement. With the magnanimous growth in the industrial sector, the amount of carbon emission has been massive. We look forward to helping organizations to analyze their carbon emission and providing them with techniques to reduce their carbon footprints. School and college-going students play a vital role in the future of tomorrow, it is imperative to make them understand the need to reduce their carbon footprint. with the use of the app, stories and animated videos can be provided for students to make the understand severity of the condition and how to fight these conditions. Environmentalists play a crucial role in helping spread awareness to provide them with a helping hand our app will allow them to host events and provide badges to organizers and participants to boost their morale in the journey of saving the environment.