Pothole Discovery App

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  Screenshot of the app

Inspiration

I have a long history of hate with potholes. Once, I was riding my bike peacefully when, suddenly, I rolled over a gargantuan pothole worthy of the most astronomical of black holes... And it shook me so hard that I almost fell off my bike. Another time, I was on a school bus and tried to take a sip of water. The bus must have rolled on another of those potholes as a quake sent my bottle's content splashing all over me. In the newspapers, we keep seing how much difficulty the city of Montreal has with mending the holes. I decided to do something.

What it does

My app runs on smartphones. Just put it in your car or on your bike. It senses the vibrations of your ride and when it denses a particularly strong one, it identifies it as a pothole and saves the latitude and longitude of that pothole in a text file, which can then be sent to the city of Montreal in order to get it repaired.

How I built it

I used MIT App Inventor, which is a simple development environment for Android applications. It uses a visual language that consists in dragging-and-dropping blocks of code.

Challenges I ran into

It's my first time making an Android app and my first time using that visual language to make something, so I had to learn everything very quickly. Also, I originally wanted the app to send the latitude and longitude to Google Maps in order to get the street address of the pothole, but I did not succeed in implementing that.

After I export the app, the saving-in-a-file feature does not work, so for the moment I can only use it on the MIT App Inventor companion app, kinda like a demo.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I proud of learning how to make a basic Android app in one day.

What I learned

I learned how to program basic Android apps using MIT App Inventor. The coolest thing about this is that I could make any app that answers any of my need, quite easily. I definitely will try building some apps in the future.

What's next for Pothole Discovery App

I would like to make it communicate efficiently with Google Maps in order to get precise locations of potholes. Also, the city should have a central interactive map on which all the potholes reported by users are displayed. Also, the app should have some kind of pattern recognition feature that can tell the difference between the vibrations caused by a pothole and by other kinds of cracks or bumps.

Built With

• mit-app-inventor