Who are we?
RoSE (Robotic Space Exploration) is an undergraduate team pioneering solutions for problems within and beyond this planet.
What is Alaka'i?
Hawaii's hiking trails are gateways into the unique ecosystems of the islands; Hikers can find breathtaking views at every corner. However, local ecosystems and communities are straining with the recent influx of people flocking to these trails. Trails are deteriorating, misinformation is rampant, and local communities struggle with trespassing and disruption. Alaka'i proposes the solutions to these tremendous problems. Alaka'i provides an informative, accurate, and reliable catalog of information to assist hikers in finding their next adventure. At the same time, hikers can see trail traffic forecasts through our real-time and predictive traffic data. We even encourage unofficial "reservations" which allow us to warn other hikers of a potentially busy day. With our app, hikers can make better choices for when and where to have their next outing. We hope to encourage sustainable trail use and exploration of new trails with new adventures! Finally, our donation system makes it simple to support your favorite trails, preserving their beauty for generations to come.
How Alaka'i was built
This project was built using Node.JS, Django, and React. Our dynamic database quickly provide realtime data to ensure the latest information is given to our users. Leaflet and Mapbox are used to power our maps. Trail data was collected from the Na Ala Hele Trail Database.
Challenges and Accomplishments
The biggest challenge our team encountered was the management of large datasets across multiple local development platforms. Passing the necessary data to every corner of the project was difficult and clunky at first, but through a large-scale overhaul of our database and restructuring to use AJAX requests, we were able to clean up our code and easily access our database information. Another large accomplishment for the team was the sudden delve into web development. A majority of our team has little to no prior experience with web development, yet we were able to use this competition as an opportunity to jump in head first into new territory, which significantly accelerated our growth as programmers. We were able to learn more about web design, proper coding practices, and maximizing the use of version control systems.
What's next for Alaka'i
Alaka'i's next goals are to implement catalog and traffic data to provide tailored recommendations to individual users. By providing hikes that are both a good "fit" to the user and less trafficked, we hope to ease burden on popular trails while introducing hikers to previously unknown adventures. We would also like to implement safety features to keep hikers aware of their trip and an emergency contact to be notified in the case the user is lost. The idea of a points system is also being tossed around, in order to encourage users to make and follow their reservations. We would like to focus on adding usability for new and veteran hikers, whilst solidifying our core functionalities and polishing our frontend.
Running The Project
In order to run the app locally, follow the instructions on our GitHub repository here.
Otherwise, please enjoy our app on your favorite browser! https://www.alakai.xyz/
If you are having issues with the above link, try this one: https://rose-hacc.herokuapp.com/
(Note, our database is still relatively empty for the technical review. We currently have 6 cards for different hikes and a few days (11/8-11/13) of traffic data on the site. The site's functionalities lie within the database, thus reservations/traffic visualization will be limited to the hikes we currently have models for. For this technical review, we are more concerned with showing the functionality and what is possible with the app.)
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