Team Ford Future

Our App consisted of two key features, Automated Climate control and Adaptive charging. These features will save the users on time and money.

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Inspiration

Our team is passionate about improving the lives of others through technology. We saw this hackathon as an opportunity to help save time and money for Ford app users.

What it does

Our app allows users to remotely set the internal temperature of their cars and turn on/off defrosters which can save users time from going out to their cars and setting climate controls or waiting in their cars for the defrosters to clear windshield visibility. We also have a battery charging feature that allows EV users to delay charging so that they can charge during off peak electricity hours to save money on their utility bills.

How we built it

We built this project in Android Studio with the Java programming language and created dynamic web API's created in python on the Django framework for updating temperature settings and battery charge. The app is mostly a demonstration of what these features could look like if implemented in a real app.

Challenges we ran into

We didn't have a lot of time in this hackathon, as we joined somewhat late. It forced us to do a lot of work in a relatively short period of time and could only implement so many features in the time we had.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given the amount of time we had, we felt that we were able to develop an app that effectively conveys our thoughts to Ford on how they could improve upon their mobile app and Ford API.

What we learned

No two members in our group had the same programming background, but we were able to meet often and find common ground in ways that we could collaborate so that all our skills could be utilized to produce a working app. We also learned a great deal about web API's through using Postman.

What's next for Team Ford Future

An additional feature that would improve the battery recharging feature would be providing the user with the off-peak electricity hours in their area by using a web API or web scraper. We have been thinking about how to implement this.

Another feature is scheduling a time for vehicle ignition to start and would suggest to the user times to start the vehicle based on previous times in the day they have started their cars.

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