rento

Inspiration

Our group went to a Hackathon in Montreal and we found getting around to be very difficult even with Uber, and car rentals are too inconvenient to pursue.

What it does

The website displays a map of the user's location as well as the cars located near them.

Since internet access can be difficult while on the move, it is possible for users to input their current location as an address through SMS which then compares the user's location to the location of cars stored in a database. The address of the car nearest to the user is sent through SMS, as well as the car's make and model. The user can then text that they have reserved that car which makes it invisible to others, allowing the user to go to the car's location and start driving. When the car is done being driven, the user can unreserve the car through SMS, and others can then see it and reserve it.

How we built it

Using Twilio, we return the nearest available vehicle that can be rented through SMS.

Users can access a map of all available vehicles through the website. The distance between the user's location and locations of the closest cars is calculated with the Haversine Formula. Latitudes and longitudes are extracted using Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we wanted to use RFID/NFC and an Arduino as means of "checking in" when checking out cars (whether through reservation or just on the street). However, the Arduino was not compatible with standard libraries for the RFID chip, thus, the only alternative would have been to write an interface from scratch in C++.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing this project made us incredibly proud of our final outcome, especially as first years!

What we learned

We learned how to use Twilio, Flask, ngrok, and other technologies. Additionally, we learned about the usefulness and application of mathematics (Haversine formula)!