Remus: Mars Weather App

Remus Home Screen
App Icon

Inspiration

Initially, I didn't plan to make a simple weather app, but coming up with an idea on the spot was somewhat difficult. After searching for cool APIs I could use, I stumbled across all of NASA's many open APIs, and weather info for Mars was one of them. After going back and forth on ideas that I could do in about 6 hours because my schedule was already packed, but I wanted to participate anyway, we are here with Remus.

Why the name?

Because every cool startup/app needs some Latin in it somewhere. Remus is one of the sons of Mars. Did you know he was killed by his brother? I guess most mythological gods were killed by another at some point. Wild.

What it does

Remus is a simple weather app that shows the current weather, along with some other information like atmospheric pressure, UV index, sunrise, and sunset. It is sadly not real-time because it takes a few days for the spacecraft to beam down the data. So we’re about 4-5 days behind. Sads 😔. But I want to work on a weather prediction model that would allow us to predict the current weather and beyond.

How we built it

I used flutter mainly for the frontend app, using Figma to plan out the UI (though in six hours, it's still pretty basic). I used NodeJS to do some backend work to clean up some of the API calls from NASA's InSight API along with some basic web scraping to get other information on Mars. The NodeJS backend is hosted on Heroku as a REST API using Express.

Challenges we ran into

As you have probably heard me talk about many times, I really only had six hours to get this done because of my job and other life happenings taking up much of my time. It was definitely a challenge and I wished I had more time, but it was a fun challenge.

I could only make a build for Android because Apple and IOS made it pretty difficult to publically give out without having to get a release approved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of how much I got done in my limited time span. It's also nice to get more experience with Flutter and NodeJS.

What we learned

I need more time to work on these types of things 😂. Sometimes, even NASA's APIs don't work properly. Flutter is pretty cool.

What's next for Remus: Mars Weather App

I had a lot that came to mind when I first brainstormed the idea but had to cut a lot of it out to fit in the limited time span. One of the biggest things I wanted to do and still want to do when I have time is to build a machine learning model that would allow you to predict future weather on Mars. I also want to streamline the UI a bit and add more UX elements like little animations and stuff.

It would also be pretty cool to make this a full-fledged app that I can publish to app stores!

Overall I am happy with what I got done but there is still a lot I want to do on this before I can call it finished.

Figma: Design

GitHub Repo: github.com/zackumar/mars_weather_app

GitHub: github.com/zackumar Website: zackumar.github.io

APK DOWNLOAD: http://zackumar.github.io/files/remus.apk