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  Home Page

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  Map Interface

Inspiration

Parking can be difficult to find, especially in congested areas such as urban cities. People roam around in their cars looking for parking in these areas, causing unnecessary congestion and pollution. This inspired us to create a website that searches for parking spaces near you or a specific address.

ParkIt

We created ParkIt, a website that helps find parking areas within an area of an inputted location using HTML/CSS, Node.js, JavaScript, Next Parking Lot API, and Google Maps Web API.

How We Built It

We embedded a live Google Maps window into a website and pulled data of parking spaces within a certain bounding box from the Next Parking Lot API based on a marker placed at a certain location. We placed markers all over the bounding box where parking spaces were located. Each marker leads to directions to the location using Google Maps.

Challenges We Ran Into

• Finding a way to pull the coordinates of the parking spaces found in the bounding box.
• Finding and pulling the formatted address of a lat-long coordinate pair.
• Lots of research was required to learn to adapt the Google Maps API to our project.

Accomplishments

• Creating our own APIs
• Successfully implemented the Google Maps API and Next Parking Lot API.
• Successfully integrated operations on the map interface (zooming, panning, satellite view)

What We Learned

We were able to learn how to use the Google Maps API and developed a strong understanding of how to implement and manipulate data given by APIs. We also learned a lot of front-end and back-end skills with HTML, CSS, Node.js, and JavaScript.

What's Next for ParkIt

Our plans for the future include integration with a mobile app and adding extensive data such as rural area support, degree of usage, and varied-size search areas. We also plan to implement a computer vision algorithm to search for parking spaces in the bounding box that are not documented on the Next Parking Lot API.

Built With

• express.js
• google-developer-tools
• html/css
• javascript
• mysql
• next-parking-lot-api
• node.js