Go 'N Gas

Inspiration

I always forget to get gas when I'm going on a trip, but am a broke college student. Considering I'm glued to my phone, all I need to do is text this bot, and it'll give me a link to google maps with the gps ready to stop at a cheap gas station on the way.

What it does

Text our twilio number with: go (start address) (end address) Twilio responds with a google maps link for your route, with the cheapest (and closest) gas station already planned on your route, ready for your gps.

How we built it

Used twilio to recognize and store message data. Use google directions and google places api to check a radius around you for gas stations every leg (turn) on your route. Use beautiful-soup/selenium to run the address of each nearby gas station through a crowd sourced website for recent gas prices. Return a new google maps route with the gas station included Twilio takes this route link, and sends it back to the user to use for gps on their phone

Challenges we ran into

Using csv file to store individualized data with twilio Data mining a dynamic website using beautifulsoup is difficult Time constraint: must be exact address with proper format, unable to implement our other goals of sending your gps location (iphone) and sending a google maps link with your route already planned

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing a from scratch project with APIs we never used before Getting correct results for hand read inputs The entire back end of it works when we hand feed data, but unfortunately the current version as of 11:50AM doesn't run because of issues with transferring data from twilio to a csv file and reading that file concurrently

What we learned

None of us used these APIs before, so now we're more confident in trying out new things.

What's next for Go 'N Gas

Currently we're running on a trial run of twilio and can't support much volume; we'll try to make it easily usable for multiple people at the same time We also want to add sending your gps location (iphone) and sending a google maps link with your route. Further, we'd like to make this implementable in the google maps app