Inspiration
Konrad is an avid snowboarder and lives equidistantly from a few ski resorts. He wanted a quick and simple dashboard to see what the weather and snow conditions are at nearby resorts without having to manually check each resort's weather information. Having some sort of indication on how busy the resorts were would also be very helpful.
What it does
The website gets the user's location and finds the nearest four resorts to the user. Then it populates the weather information for those resorts. It uses an object detection library to determine how busy the resort might be.
How we built it
The front end was built using React. The front end does multiple API calls to internet API sources and our backend. The backend was built using the Flask framework. First the backend calculates the nearest resorts to the user and then calls the Open Weather Map API to get the weather of the resorts. The backend also runs an object detection software on a set of 4 trail camera images to determine how many people are at the resorts (these photos are currently static as the team did not have time to web-scrape the trail cameras at the resorts).
Challenges we ran into
We ran into every error imaginable it feels like. We started off trying to follow Django tutorials but it was simply out of our scope and we couldn’t get anything to stick. Next we tried flask and had the start of a back end running but ran into more issues. Vscode not recognizing imports, a back end environment that seems to have the required packages and modules which couldn’t be found in the python files. Github wouldn’t allow us to upload the back end environment as it had too many files so we were just uploading the individual files that we changed. Integrating front end and back end was also difficult as we ran into an endless amount of CORS issues stemming from our development environment.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I’m really proud that we managed to get a full stack application running, considering prior to this hackathon we knew nothing about backend and 3/4 of us have never used any front end technologies in a project before. Also the use of a backend makes it so we can add features later easier, so scalability is nice. Furthermore none of us has ever made an API call before and in this application we each got to learn how to.
What's next for goBeavs
We’d like to connect our object identification script to a web scraped live feed from the trail camera resorts have and get a live count of the current occupancy of each resort. We’d also like to implement a user favorites on the homepage of our app to add to the convenience and usability aspect. We are currently working on deploying the app to heroku and will hopefully have it live soon.
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