Inspiration
The data! Upon examining the European Environment Agency's Dataset on CO2 emissions from passenger cars, we felt that it was our mission to go the extra mile for the people and give vehicle owners great insight into carbon footprints by their vehicles, and therefore develop their sense of responsibility towards the environment.
What it does
We feel that the numerical approach is optimal for this project. The project takes the user's geolocational input and their vehicle model. Then, sustainApple decides whether they're walking, running, or driving by calculating the speed of the tracked device.
This is where our Dataset comes into place. We then use the numbers from our dataset to give live updates on the user's carbon footprint. The final perk of our project is the leaderboard system: we use a certain algorithm to compare and rank users based on their apple! score. We hope that this makes users more aware of their consumption.
How we built it
We focused on using Python for our whole infrastructure. After finding a free API that allows us to track the position of our mobile phone accurately by using GPS, we were able to start with our application.
Challenges we ran into
We started with three people, one person who was very professional in C# who started creating the whole Interface and Backend. Unfortunately, after ~8hours he told us that he won't continue the hackathon so we - as we both haven't worked with C# yet - needed to start from scratch.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
One of us didn't know much about GUIs but he was able to learn everything by himself and create a well-working GUI. Also getting and cleaning of all the possible car models was a lot of work.
What we learned
We learned how to use Databases in Python and find, integrate and use an API that tracks the exact phone position (+-10-15m). We learned how to create GUIs in Python and how to clean up data.
What's next for sustainApple!
There are plenty of possibilities to extend this app. First, we can make this app work on mobile phones. Next, we would like to add all possible transportation modes with accurate estimations of their corresponding carbon emissions. You could extend this app to not only visualize the carbon emissions for travelling but also for other carbon-intense activities. By making it accessible to a wide range of people, saving carbon emissions and working out can become more competitive and social so that more people actually want to improve their climate balance. Additionally for people with sensors (Apple watch, health watches, ...), one could extend the walking, running and cycling to provide a total health index besides the sustainability score.
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