UF C.A.T Tracker - Campus Animal Tracker

Sighting with Picture!
Map Overview
Hover Text
Homepage
Add a sighting

🐈 Inspiration

Everyone loves posting about their cat sightings on reddit and instagram (and we love seeing it), so we thought about how we could improve the experience for everyone. Jake, being very allergic to cats, also thought it would be great to include other animals.

⛳ What it does

The C.A.T tracker utilizes a dataset created by the public to display a webpage with custom markers for the different animals on campus. • If you spotted an animal on campus, you can fill in the form at the bottom of the page to add it to the map. The form will use your current location and input to determine where and what to put on the map. You can also add a picture to show with the marker! • If you're just looking around, you can view all the current sightings on the map and hover over each icon to see which cat (or critter) it is and how long since it was spotted. If there is a 📸 on the hover, clicking on the icon will reveal a picture of the critter taken by the person who marked it.

💻 How we built it

Built using Python with Flask, Folium, and some other helpful packages. We implement the Folium map as html (and the icons on the map as html) and use Flask to make the webpages. Currently hosted on the local device. Uses the location of the user to determine where to put the pin on the map, and the dropdown input to pick which icon to use.

🚦 Challenges we ran into

We had greater plans but ultimately there was not enough time to implement them in time for the submission, but we hope to continue the project anyway!

🐊 Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned

The two of us have participated in Swamphacks as a team for the past 3 years. After all this time, we can confidently say we finally have a working and (mostly) polished submission! Inevitably, practice makes perfect. Through our classes and our own personal learning, we've grown as programmers and were able to demonstrate that with this project.

🌐 What's next for UF C.A.T Tracker - Campus Animal Tracker

Unfortunately, Father Time put his foot down when it came to our grandest plans. We'd love to not only incorporate some new icons, but also host this on a live website for everyone to use. This would require a database overhaul and some tweaking to the file paths, but overall is very possible. Feel free to comment if you have any ideas!

❤ Credit

Thank you to the @cats_of_uf instagram for the cat photos on the homepage, the UF Reddit for the idea, and all of you! Icons courtesy of Dog icons created by Freepik - Flaticon

Applied for: Infotech Challenge, Best In-Theme