Scoop Scouter

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Inspiration

With summer time around the corner, it was natural that new problems would arise. One idea that we liked a lot was our struggles to find ice cream truck ice cream. Those soft serve cones, SpongeBob popsicles, and name brand ice cream sandwiches are awesome, but it's often hard to find these trucks. At the same time, we also stumbled across a website that mapped out locations in San Fransisco that were dirty. Taking these 2 ideas, we decided to make an app that tracks ice cream trucks.

What it does

Scoop scouter is a community driven app, that dynamically updates based on sightings of ice cream trucks. Users can take pictures of sightings of ice cream trucks, which is where an image processing model would determine if the image was an ice cream truck (which is to prevent spam and fraud). If it was a real truck, the image and coordinates are stored in cloud based database and a coordinate marker is dropped on the map on where the truck was sighted. Markers don't last forever and sightings disappear off the map after a certain amount of time. Users can also search addresses on the search bar to find trucks in that area as well.

How we built it

Our app was made in Android Studio, which is written in Java and XML. We used OpenCV and open source datasets to train our model which determined if the image was of an ice cream truck. Our backend was done with Google Cloud Platform and Firebase/Firestore which integrated well with the rest of the google created products. For mockups, we used Figma to plan out our project entirely.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time using OpenCV, firebase and android studio together in one project and it was challenging integrating them all together. The Google Maps API was also a bit tricky to use as well. Some features that we would like to put in were not featured due to time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were so proud of all the work we were able to accomplish. Our app dynamically changed over time, with the addition of new information into our database and we were able to successfully integrate a lot of the features we wanted, such as a camera, search bar and finding location and distance between points. Overall, we were very happy with what we made and proud that we accomplished so much.

What we learned

We learned that sometimes, even the most simple sounding ideas, can be very difficult to implement. Also, no matter how much someone claims they know what they're doing, they always learn more while working.