Inspiration
Often when we go to the shopping mall during a peak sale season or when we are running late for a movie at the theater, we fail to find a parking spot on time and experience anger and frustration till we can find the closest vacant spot. Moreover, each complex has its own design for a parking lot hence this leads to further confusion when trying to understand the layout of the parking lot. These emotions have been channeled into the energy for creating this application to make a car parking experience a whole lot better!
What it does
It first allows a designer to customize and create their parking lot (eg: the designer could be the architect of the shopping mall) by clicking on options: "road", "blank", "vacant"and "full" to make the pathways and establish a current-time situation of the parking lot. It also has the 'blank' option to change the state of the parking space once the car leaves the space for it to be empty again. Now the user can choose the 'Navigate' option to access the newly created parking lot for your current experience. The user can click on their location and be guided to the closest vacant parking spot. This is a very useful application since it allows us to customize the real time situation of the parking lot and guides them to a vacant spot with ease.
How we built it
Since our trio consisted of 2 freshmen and one information systems student we worked on Python and used tkinter for creating and customizing our parking lot. We used pickle to make our database more effective and efficient. By sharing our codes on GitHub and after a full night of debugging we were able to compile and execute this code. It required us to visualize ourselves to be in the situation to understand what features should we create in order to make the user's experience more useful.
Challenges we ran into
Well...this is a long list. Since this is our first hackathon every step of debugging seemed like an achievement in itself. We first had to learn how to use tkinter make our grid and tkinter's various in-built functions. Then we realized that after making the parking lot we realized that the driver can see the created parking lot only if the parking was fixed in the database, hence we learnt how to use pickle.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very happy that we could create an application that we find extremely useful, practical and something that we would use in our everyday life. For our first hackathon and knowing no other language apart from python between the three of us, we consider this an achievement to be able to put something up that works! :)
What we learned
We learned how to use basic animation features using tkinter, how to improve and make an efficient database. Working and coordinating the back-end, shell and tkinter's window was a task in itself. We are glad for this great first experience that has filled us with confidence to work on upcoming hackathons.
What's next for The Ultimate Parking System
We want to be able to modify the parking lots for a 3D system and also divide the parking slots into categories for 2-wheelers, 4-wheelers and trucks. With the era of self driving cars coming of age, we would love to modify our application such that these self driving cars can find it quicker to find parking slots as well.
Built With
- pickle
- python
- tkinter
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