TowerTracker

Inspiration

We were particularly inspired by the interactive imagery of Google Maps. The ability to see where your properties actually are on a map makes them feel much more real, rather than a bunch of letters and numbers on a page. Not only is it visually interesting, but it’s a reminder that each building has a real place in the world, and real environmental impacts. This visual approach also informed our decisions on how to represent the data about each location in a way that can be easily understood at a glance.

What it does

TowerTracker serves to track a number of metrics for each property, including:

Waste water output
Garbage output
Electricity usage
Carbon footprint

It represents this information in several ways, allowing the user to compare different individual properties to one another, as well as showing their average property performance. Not only that, it provides practical, actionable recommendations for shrinking each building’s footprint. These changes are monitored and charted over time, to spot trends and improvements.

How we built it

We first brainstormed, building a vision for what we wanted our end product to have and how we wanted it to look. We researched how a building’s environmental impact could be measured and where some example buildings were. Then, we launched into working. We collaborated on a React-based front-end via Github, and backend through Supabase.

Challenges we ran into

With so many events going on at the hackathon, it was difficult to keep the group together and working in sync. However, through Discord and some quality time face-to-face, we were able to keep each other on the same page.

What we're proud of

Not only were we able to come together as a group, despite having only met at the start of the hackathon, but we were able to meld our ideas into one cohesive (and useful!) vision.

What we learned

For several of us, this was our first hackathon- the hectic nature of it and the long hours of focus were a lot to contend with. We learned to go with the flow, and do what we could where we could: switching gears to be always making progress on something.