so-basicly

Inspiration

We originally had a different project in mind, but on the morning of the second day of the hackathon, our adventure to South campus for breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts turned into a whole hour of walking back and forth, trying to catch a shuttle (we ended up walking all the way from north campus to south and back). We knew that this was a more relevant problem to solve, so we immediately switched our project to so-basicly

What it does

This application uses data scraped from the Shuttle-UM website (https://transportation.umd.edu/shuttle-um) stored in a SQL database (CockroachDB). The front-end of the application works on the Django framework.

The user can select options from a list of departure and arrival stops and the program uses Dijkstra's algorithm to calculate and display the fastest possible route. The application uses an undirected graph to mimic the stops, with edges being weighted with the time it takes to get from one stop to another.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately, the Shuttle-UM website was difficult to scrape because the HTML script wasn't consistent enough for us to be able to use beautiful-soup as well as we would have liked. We did not have enough time to manually enter the data, and therefore could not progress past the data collection point.