LiveGreen

• 

  OnBording screen

• 

  Result Screen - still loading

• 

  Result screen

• 

  Verdict Screen

• 

  Learn More Screen

Inspiration

We were inspired by the need to use our expertise to make a difference no matter how little. Climate change is a global issue and most people aren't paying attention, not because they do not want to, but because they do not know how to start or where to start. We decided to contribute in our own little way by making use of our skills and expertise as well as the open source tools available, to build LiveGreen.

What it does

It is an android application that shows the climate intensity and fossil fuel percentage which varies based on the user's country or zone.

According to the climate article in NASA's website, fossil fuel contributes greatly to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere thereby contributing to the growing rate of climate change. Read more

What if we are able to combat the burning of fossil fuels? That would greatly reduce the CO2 intensity. LiveGreen aims to inform people about the fossil fuel percentage of the electricity consumed and inform them to not make use of electricity when the fossil fuel percentage is greater than or equal to 50%.

It has two main features:

• It shows the carbon intensity and fossil fuel percentage. Based on these values, it advises the user if it is safe or unsafe to make use of electricity at a particular time.
• A "Learn More" session which aims to educate users about climate change and how the electricity that they consume plays a role in it.

How we built it

• Front-End: We made use of XML for the User Interface.
• Back-End: We made use of Kotlin for the logic. We made of of Retrofit which is an open source library for retrieving data from an API. We made use of the MVVM Architecture and google play services for getting user's location.
• API: We made use of an API that is available to the public. Learn more about the CO2 Signal API

Challenges we ran into

• The first challenge was trying to pass the user's location from the view to the viewmodel. We had to pair program in order to fix the bug :)
• Not all locations are supported by the API so the result screen will show results for some people and it won't show for others.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• We have gotten good feedback from people and we are happy we are able to contribute to solving the climate change issue .
• Our User Interface looks great and the app works the way it is expected to.

What we learned

• Climate change is a serious issue and we need to pay more attention to it
• We learned how to make use of the repository and factory software design patterns
• We learned how to make use of Retrofit to retrieve data from a remote data source as well as authenticate using the API Key
• We learned how to get the longitude and latitude of a user's location
• We learned how to make use of webview for displaying websites in the application

What's next for LiveGreen

In the future, we'd like to:

• Enable push notifications in order to keep the user informed even when the app isn't in the foreground
• Create an IOS Version
• Add more features
• Revamp the User Interface
• Publish and deploy on playstore

Built With

• android
• co2signalapi
• kotlin
• retrofit