Inspiration
The inspirtation for this project came from when we were told that one of our friends was broke her ankle when hiking an unknown path. We hope that people can explore the wilderness while staying safe.
What it does
Slip uses various Google Maps APIs to take a user-inputted origin and destination to create a rating on how hard that area / path would be to hike, by calculating elevation changes and path length.
How we built it
We built Slip by using the Google Maps directions API, and the Google Maps elevation API. We created a polyline from the origin to the destination following a path or road, once we received this polyline we integrated it into the other API to generate elevation points along that polyline. After we simply calculated the elevation climb and the overall distance to give an approximate skill/difficulty level.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge our team experienced while coding was connecting the two APIs via a URL. As everyone went to sleep, Justin was the only one left trying to figure out the problem, as when we filled out the URL template it received an error. After he conceded at 6AM and slept until 7AM, was he and a mentor finally able to solve the problem, showing the true importance of taking a break.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We all came into this hackathon with very limited knowledge of programming, Akhil didn't even know any languages and Justin was the only one with experience in APIs. Regardless we stuck together, did our research together, and in the end were able to make a product we are proud of, using technology we thought previously was way above our level.
What we learned
The most important thing we all pulled from this hackathon is that we genuinely enjoy programming, and that it's something we all want to keep on learning and doing. From a technical perspective though, the (second) most valuable thing we learnt was how to use and integrate APIs, as they seem like a very intimidating thing, although now that we have gotten over out fears we can implement this extremely powerful tool in later projects.
What's next for Untitled
The next steps for Slip are definitely to create a UI web-interface using flask, which was something we planned to do but did not have enough time to. Other than UI, we think we can improve our metrics, and integrate a weather API to check for things like slippery ice. Another thing we would have loved to do is integrate a graph that shows the intensity over time for the path.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.