PP - PathPilot | Devpost

Sent to my mom and she used it in Toronto

Inspiration

As an individual who did not get the privilege to use data often, my friends and I often found ourselves in situations where we couldn't find our way home after going outside since Google Maps refused to load and we would have to search for a nearby Starbucks to use their Wi-Fi.

What we learned

Through the development of this project, we as a group developed skills in back-end development and how to apply new APIs that we've never used before to projects. We also learned how to use the cloud to deploy a web server.

How it was made

PathPilot operates by using Twilio to enable our Google Cloud Platform server to receive texts from users indicating where they are and where they want to go. It then uses the Google Maps API to get directions and then sends those directions back to the user via SMS. We used Node.js and Express.js for our backend server for receiving the texts, calling the Google Maps API and returning the directions. Our front-end website is made with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Challenges

One of the main challenges was working with the Google Maps API, due to its poor documentation and inadequate resources to build an application like PathPilot. We once spent 3 hours trying to understand why the code was not compiling, only to realize that the documentation gave us the wrong syntax for its parameters.