Spot

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  Parked - Once parked in the spot, the cost for the duration of your parking session, and maximum time remaining are displayed.

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  Searching for parking spots - either through navigating through the map, or setting an address, nearby parking spots are displayed

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  Selected parking spot - displaying location of the spot, cost per hour and parking time limit

Inspiration

Finding and paying for parking sucks, so we made it better.

What it does

Spot is a parking assist mobile web app that removes the hassle of finding and paying for parking. Spot allows a user to set where they are going, and will show nearby parking spots, as well as meter time limits and cost per hour.

How we built it

We built a Flask app that we then deployed to Heroku. The app itself is based on an Arduino sensor that would monitor a parking spot, and transmit the status, whether the spot is available or not, to a web app.

Challenges we ran into

Spot had two very large challenges, both with the hardware and software aspects of the system. In regard to hardware, he sensor and circuit that Spot use are very simple, however, pushing the data a sensor receives to a server is quite difficult. The normal way to do this is with an Arduino Ethernet Shield, however, none were available. The work-around to this was using a simple Python script that read from the Arduino data port and pushed the data up to the server. Working with a map API was difficult, and something none of us had experience with.

Built With

• arduino
• flask
• google-maps
• heroku
• javascript
• jquery
• python