Honk! Honk!

Inspiration

As UT students, one of the issues we've noticed amongst our peers is the stress caused by trying to find parking spots on campus. The current system has no coordinated approach to determining parking availability, leading to students commonly wasting time driving around instead of using their time productively. We wanted to create a product that lets anyone easily navigate campus, driving by allowing them to optimize their parking search based on their needs.

What it does

Honk! Honk! provides the best available parking spot based on a user's desired location, also being able to take into consideration distance, time, and pricing. Honk! Honk! also provides easy access to directions as it navigates users directly to Google Maps. We also included the "Flock Favs" feature, which bookmarks the user's favorite parking spots available to them at any time.

How we built it

We first focused on designing the visual aspect of the product, utilizing Figma Design and Make while also simultaneously creating our own custom hand-drawn graphics to stylize the user interface. From there, we used AI to create starter code for the navigation system and to build the mathematical models that calculate the availability rate. From there, we examined the code to adjust the availability rate function as well as fine-tune the UI.

Challenges we ran into

We were able to incorporate the Google Maps JavaScript API into our demo site, but we were unable to incorporate it into our GitHub page product due to uncertainty in implementing it without security concerns.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our user interface is easily navigable, looks polished, and presents cohesively. Regardless of our execution shortcomings, we find the idea behind our project to be very impactful if thoroughly integrated within our community.

What we learned

As first-time hackers, we learned a lot about the process of ideation and how to approach planning and creating an MVP within a short time period. We learned about the limitations and utility of the many different technologies we used to create this project.

What's next for the project!

Our first step would be to properly integrate the API into our product. In terms of expanding our scope, we plan to utilize city parking meter data so that Honk! Honk! can tell the user exactly how many parking spots are available and in use. Other useful features we'd like to implement include a system that allows users to reserve parking spots in advance and remote parking meter payment.

Built With

• chatgpt
• claude
• figma
• google-distance
• google-maps
• gps
• html
• javascript