NaviHome

Inspiration

My friends and I have lots of painful experience of going through traffic jam in Hsuehshan Tunnel. Therefore, we wanted to think of a solution that can at least relief the suffering of the driver and the passenger in jam or a way to reduce the traffic.

What it does

We have Cellular Automaton that simulate traffic situation in Hsuehshan tunnel and compute a recommended speed for app users to follow so that the random braking act are reduced. By following the recommended speed, the ETC toll fees will also be deducted by a discount rate to encourage users to drive faster through the tunnel. Other than that, it shows the user the arrival time in Taipei for different time of departure driving through three different route - Hsuehshan tunnel, Beiyi Highway and winding shoreline highway. Also, it provides two options to people who decide to depart later. They can either appreciate the sceneries along the route sorted by their distance or enjoy Yilan's delicacies while waiting for the time to pass.

How I built it

AppInventor,MySql,PhpMyAdmin,Matlab

Challenges I ran into

I don't know how to write Java, MySql or use PhpMyAdmin at all and AppInventor isn't that user friendly. All the coding are learned from the scratch. AppInventor codes are not that understandable and repeatable in usage. It's crazy that all the tables are constructed one by one and all of the tables's width,height values are changed one by one.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The largest accomplishment is of course completing this App.

What I learned

In the process, I learned how to write a bit of MySql, PHP. Also, i have conquered many difficulties such as knowing how to use Crontab on linux server, knowing how to use TELNET and SSH to login to server as root, knowing how to use skip-grant-tables on MySql's my.ini file and many more.

What's next for NaviHome

We already have a feasible concept and an app that can receive OBDII signal and we hope to cooperate with the government of Taiwan to encourage the use of OBDII in every car. In this way, the real time data can be obtained and we can use our Cellular Automaton model with real values to really solve traffic problem in Taiwan.