Inspiration
Carpooling is a fantastic way to travel from campus to your home. It is convenient, fun, and most importantly better for the environment than flying. Current platforms are great, but could be improved to be easier and safer to use. A better user experience means more carpoolers, and more carpoolers means a reduced carbon footprint.
What it does
The app allows users to find and post rides that are visible to students at their universities. Students will then be able to communicate with their drivers and coordinate the ride through Messenger. Users can search for rides using a convenient search function.
The app seamlessly integrates with existing facebook pages, reading and writing ride postings to the page so there is no pain for the user to transition over to the new platform and new users have access to the vast network already present.
How I built it
A python script running on GCP routinely scrapes the facebook pages, parses the important information using Wit.Ai and then sends the data into a firebase database that the iOS app is able to pull data from.
Challenges I ran into
Learning new technologies hindered progress with such a short deadline
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We stuck around until the end even when things didn't look great
What I learned
Build skills before the hackathon so the only time killer is illusive bugs
What's next for route troop
Future features include posting rides from the app, the ability to publicly praise your driver for their excellent driving and building their clout in the carpooling community.
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