UVA Rides

Inspiration

We were inspired to make this project after seeing the CO2 emissions for large vehicles and needing a secure solution for university ride sharing and carpooling.

The use of blockchain and our own decentralized tokens prevents fraud and allows public proof of all transactions. This prevents drivers from not getting paid and riders from being "ghosted," an issue that occurs in many other apps.

What we learned

We learned how to create an entire Django app with multiple features/media, analyze emission data with a Jupyter Notebook, create and mint an ERC-20 token with Solidity (viewable on Etherscan), and use Google Cloud.

How it was built

We built our project in Django (using Python, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). We also used Solidity and Jupyter Notebook. We used Google Cloud to create a project and an instance of our database.

Challenges

As this was both of our first hackathons, we faced tons of issues.

We wanted to connect directly to the MetaMask wallet in Chrome, but were unable to get the JS working for that. We also spent hours trying to deploy to Google Cloud, but had problems with this. Lastly, we wanted to create more of a profile page, but it was difficult to integrate with the Google Authentication functionality. We also wanted to create a dashboard to better visualize car and CO2 emissions data, but Chartjs was extremely difficult to integrate into our app (especially since none of us know JavaScript).

Future plans

We want to expand to different schools and also work commute groups. Additionally, we want to configure it so that if EV vehicles are used, then we will give the drivers a smaller commission on the fees that are being charged, incentivizing the use of clean energy. In the future, we also want to make it more community or social-media based as this will increase insight on users and will improve connectivity.