earthDB

Inspiration

We wanted to create a site that would be not only useful, but relevant to present events as well. So, we came up with the Earth Dashboard. This website was made to give incentive for saving the planet. We acknowledge that small changes to everyday life can mean big impact for our environment in the long run. Through this website, we hope to change typical habits into better, practical, and sustainable habits that can improve the environment.

What it does

This website uses the weather underground API to add weather forecasts to our website. We provide the user with the current temperature and weather conditions, a 10 day forecast, some calculations on water usage, and an opportunity to sign up for a emailing list for a daily tip!

How we built it

We built Earth Dashboard by splitting the work into smaller chunks, and those smaller chunks were assigned to group members. We tried our best to split it into five parts, one for each group member based on the difficulty and the group member's skill set. This ended up working out very well and everyone learned something new. At the end, we all worked together to bring our respective parts together onto the website.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some challenges with our email client, especially adding and removing people from our emailing list. This was a challenge for our Python developer, and our PHP developer, but by working together we were able to iron out the communications.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are quite proud of the UI, and the fact that we were able to implement our main four functionalities (survey, email client, 10 day forecast, header/UI updating with live temperature and conditions).

What we learned

Some of our members had no prior experience with web dev languages like PHP, JavaScript, and jQuery. They gained valuable experience in how these languages can interact with each other. Our three junior level members had never worked on managing a project of this scope, namely building API functionality together.

What's next for earthDB

We hope to format the site for mobile use, and provide more tips based on the 10 day forecast.

Built With

Submitted to

OtterHacks
- Winner Third Place

Created by

I spent most of my time playing around with the Weather Underground API. This was my first time implementing an API on a website, so it took some time learning how to parse the data. Overall, I gained a lot of experience with incorporating an API.

Sean McCarthy
My contribution to the project was the jQuery, and Javascript portion. It was a great experience, because it was my first time using the language. The implementation wasn't difficult for me, because I had previous experience with CSS/HTML in a Coursera course. The task I was assigned to develop was a calculator implementation about the user's usage of water when watering their lawn. Also, another implementation about usage about how long they take showers, and how many times they shower per week.

Alexander Morales
I worked on the website framework and design, as well as the live weather under the navigation bar. I also helped other group members on Python, PHP, and jQuery.

Lucas Childers
I was the main Python developer who created all the pseudo-databases: email subscription database, tip database, and indexing database. Through modular, object-oriented programming, I created a program that can parse through a given database, write into the database, and read the database and use the data stored for sending emails. Additionally, I created the program that sends the emails based on the subscription database, and the tips database.

Andy Kor
Worked on the backend of the website. I worked with PHP to get our users to subscribe to our newsletter, and to unsubscribe if they like. I also worked on testing on our database.

Daniel Mora