SlugCycle

The main UI students will be greeted with

Inspiration

Are you a UC Santa Cruz student who wants to bike around campus? Yet can never find a BCycle?

What it does

SlugCycle is an app that allows students to see when the best times to get a BCycle are by analyzing historic trends and identifying patterns to give the student the peak times and usage trends of each station. This allows students to accurately predict whether or not a station will give them a BCycle.

How we built it

We used a React frontend with MaterialUI for styling. The map comes from MapBox and the underlying technology is Vite.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of challenges we ran into were based on the map. For example, two issues with the map were that our components would not render on top of the map, causing them to get covered. A second issue was that the map would constantly re-render on any action and that would significantly slow down the website. Passing data from the API through the map markers and the sidebar component was also a surprising amount of work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we created a clean UI and high-speed experience. We are also proud that we accomplished the goal we set out to achieve: the goal of making a better experience than the official BCycle app for students.

What we learned

We learned React, as most of our members have never used React before besides small tinkering. This was a huge undertaking and we all left with a far stronger knowledge of React.JS.

What's next for SlugCycle

The future of SlugCycle is to create a cross-platform app across Android and iOS. Since BCycles are constantly on the move, its useful to have a mobile app.