GreenLink

A educational project for renewable energy along with a community section where people can ask questions and share their experience.

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Inspiration

There are many houses, lights, and other structures with solar panels for energy, but whenevr I think about installing it I do not know where to start. Considering this fact, I originally decided to make a solar panel guide/calculator to evaluate houses' solar potential. However, after hours of browsing for information I discovered a dataset on Kaggle named Google Project Sunroof which led me to the website of Google's Project Sunroof. It evaluates your house's solar potential with ease and provides many more useful information on installation. I find it be a better alternative for the current project I've been working on, however, it tooks me 2 or 3 hours of browsing solar panel installaton info to get there. As a result, I decide to make a website about spreading information, and here's GreenLink, a project with educational resources and a communtiy section for extra information from everyone with experience.

What it does

The application contains educational resources and links to people to know more about renewable energy like solar power and wind power, and also helps them know more about the evaluation and installation of solar panels and mini wind turbines. Moreover, it has a community section where people can share their experience, questions, and advice on topics related to renewable energy.

How we built it

I built it using Dart with the Flutter framework with Firebase for database and login authentication.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges I run into is adjusting layout according to device and screen size. By making the website semi-responsive, I made two designs one for desktop and one for mobile. And I also adjust some design just for mobile device. But one huge benefit about flutter is its cross-platform compilation which allows me to run my application smoothly on web, android and ios.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is my first truly cross-platform application which involves the web, android and ios, and I have become a lot more familiar with flutter and developing cross-platform applications.

What we learned

I learned about responsive design, backend with firebase, real-time data communication. I also significatly improved my coding ability by creating reusable component instead of bland code that I have to retype everytime.

What's next for GreenLink

  • Add more educational resources on renewable energy.
  • Let more people know about the application so more people can benefit from it.
  • Improve on the UI.
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