FORD BT :: Business Traveler

Keeping a handle on your business expenses can be a chore. With FORD BT, one click of a button lets you track the mileage and fuel consumption during work-related trips and export them all to Excel.

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Inspiration

A friend told me how difficult it was for him to keep track of all his driving-related information during business trips. If he did not write the information down at the very beginning, he would sometimes have to approximate mileage and fuel consumption. And then getting this all into a spreadsheet required even more work. Enter FORD BT.

What it does

FORD BT shows a map of the vehicle's current location and a big button on the home screen, allowing the user to simply press the button at the start of a business-related trip. The vehicle's current information (fuel level and mileage, as well as GPS position) are entered into the database. Once the user completes the trip, they can press the big button and once again, the vehicle's current information is stored. This can be repeated for all of the user's business trips.

The EXPENSES tab allows the user to view and filter the trips, and export them to Excel (as a CSV).

How I built it

I used my previous project, Curphew, as the base for this project. It runs on PHP, MySQL and JQuery.

Challenges we ran into

I wanted to create an Android widget at first, but figured I'd be cutting off a good chunk of the market, since Apple users would not be able to use it. So I switched it to a web app - and getting it to look good on different screen sizes was the biggest challenge.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

That I was able to complete two projects for the Ford Connect Hackathon. I had this idea for a few weeks and getting it into a final project and seeing it work in real life was a real joy.

What I learned

Being as this is my second Ford Connect project, I learned even more about the Ford Connect API and how to obtain the vehicle information in the most efficient way possible.

What's next for FORD BT :: Business Traveler

It would be fantastic to get the Android widget and the Apple equivalent made, so that the user would be able to press the toggle button straight from their phone's home screen.

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