Waltham Green Project

Inspiration

After bouncing off ideas with one of the representatives from Rocket, our team decided to design a web app based around sustainability. At our school (Bentley University), there is a large emphasis on being sustainable by lowering our energy usage and more. However, there is not information about how to be environmentally friendly in the long term as people tend to go back to their original habits after a short amount of time.

What it does

Our web app is designed to measure the amount of energy and water used on each house and street in Waltham. This would later be used on the leader-board, creating an incentive to reduce their energy and water usage because people want to know that they are doing better than their neighbors.

How we built it

For the website, we used HTML, CSS, and javascript. For the database, we used MySQL and the rest of the backend was handled by Java. We created a RESTful API to handle GET requests from the website.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest roadblock we ran into was getting JSON responses from our API to be read by our Javascript frontend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are SUPER proud of our whole team collaborating together to make something that we are passionate about!

Creating the Java Rest API, integrating with mySQL

What we learned

We learned how to make a HeatMap using google maps API, how to import data into mySQL, LOTS of Regex with over 3.5 million lines of data, Bootstrap!, JDBC, Pushing and pulling on GitHub!

What's next for Waltham Green Project

We hope to flesh out the rest of the functionality, implement on a cloud server, and show that energy usage and water consumption are things that can be abused, and sometimes may need to be moderated for sustainable living.