Inspiration
In a crowded Singapore with more than 900,000 vehicles, there is bound to be overcrowding in our carparks, especially in places that are more popular among Singaporeans and during peak hours. The frustration of a driver in finding an available lot in a crowded carpark can be remedied if the driver is informed about the availability of lots in the carpark that he/she wants to go. The driver could also use pivotal information such as whether there are alternative carparks near his/her destination that contains available lots in order to decide: parkWhere?
What it does
parkWhere? is a Mobile App that centers around a screen showing the map of a location in Singapore. On the map, there are markers that marks the location of carparks in Singapore. Users can search for his/her destination on the search bar and our map will show a view of the map around the user's destination. Users can click on each marker to display various information of the carpark, such as the live availability of lots in the carpark and the expected availability of lots for when the user reaches the carpark. Other information such as the pricing of the carpark will also be given to the user to aid the user in his/her decision on where to park optimally.
As a form of convenience, our app also brings the user to Google Maps and sets the navigation to the destination carpark of the user's choice automatically with a click of the button Bring Me There. This completes a convenient flow of sequence in helping the user reach his/her destination.
The app is supported by both Android and iOS.
How I built it
The app is built with the Flutter framework using the programming language Dart. The expected availability calculation is done using an artificial neural network created with Tensorflow.
Challenges I ran into
One of the challenges we ran into was caused by the Google API limits given. We were very careful with testing our software as we did not want to exceed the API query limit. On top of that, the google autocomplete API for the search bar was also very expensive, and hence we are very cautious to not use it too much and too quickly.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Within the duration of the Hackathon, we finished up the app and successfully implemented all the features that we had intended to implement. I also have no prior experience to app development, and hence being able to contribute to programming an app was a huge accomplishment for me.
What I learned
I learned how to code in Dart and how to use the Flutter framework. I learned how to call do API requests and to parse json objects around in my program. I also learned how to apply machine learning to my program by interfacing a tensorflow model with our code.
What's next for parkWhere?
We want to roll this app out in the app store so that all drivers in Singapore could benefit from this.
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