Parking++

Parking So Nice, We Added It Twice

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Inspiration

You are going to the Chase Center to see the Warriors win yet another game. Then five minutes away, you realize you forgot to account for the extra $60 cost of parking. What do you do? Drive around wasting time to find free parking? Wasting gas to try to avoid the extra cost? This is a major issue that has caused the average person to lose 17 hours of their life looking for parking costing them an average $345. This issue can easily be solved through our product Parking++.

Slogan

Parking So Nice, We Added it Twice.

What it does

Parking++ is a web app that aims to help you find parking suitable to your needs. Users can input the location, and the output is the distance from destination, cost, and availability of the parking. Then, the user can use Google Street View to preview where they can park, essentially creating a user friendly environment to solve all their parking needs.

How we built it

For our front end, we used Figma to create a framework for our website. We used the code from Figma in Vue.js as a base and made the entire user interface from there. Our backend is built off of Flask making use of the INRIX Blocks API to generate our dataset.

Challenges we ran into

The implementation of Google Maps into the web app was the hardest part and caused glitches within the website. We also realized our choice of Vue limited us since Vue helps with product scalability, but has negative impacts on building the base functionality, since sending data between components is quite a hassle. We came to the conclusion that if we accounted for this sooner, Angular would've suited our needs better, especially with some available plug-ins. Along with that, we had a lot of raw HTML and CSS elements which meant we had to account for many minor factors on various displays and minor adjustments. This added to our difficulty when it came to implementing our search bar and buttons and centering our page layout.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accomplishment we are most proud of has to come down to our Google Maps Integration. When it came to the planning stages of our project, we knew ease of use and a Consumer-Centric product is what our team wanted to accomplish. Having the Google Maps Integration with an Accessible Street View, so users can see their parking spots ahead of time and get an idea of where they would be looking to go, felt as though we really tied the project back to our goal of being a Consumer-Centric product.

What we learned

We learned how to use frameworks, and how HTML, CSS, and Javascript can play various roles depending on the framework you are using, as the scope of a project can change based off that decision. Learning to use the intricacies of Vue for our needs was a major challenge, and other frameworks may have been better when it came to sharing data between our components. However, the Vue framework can make a product easily scalable for developers. In regards to the back end, we were able to improve upon our API integration skills, since we had to call upon multiple API's being the INRIX Block's, Google Maps Javascript, and the Token API we were accessing. The Flexibility of Flask allowed us to accomplish this within a timely manner so we could work on expanding the feature set of our product. And finally, it was super exciting to learn how to host through the cloud with AWS.

What's next for Parking++

With Parking++ we were able to accomplish the general gist of what we set out to do, but that does not mean we got to every feature we wanted to implement. The next steps would essentially be to build off the versatility for the user. There were a few parameters we originally set out to account for, but we were not able to accomplish them within the time constraints. These parameters were to take in inputs regarding size of the users' vehicle, capacity of the lot, access to chargers for EV's, and more. In addition, refining the current features would definitely be a must to start off, since we felt as though the lack of our functioning search to make readjustments into the Google Maps API really took away from the user experience, but this issue could also be easily fixed given more time to deliver a more complete product to our users.

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