Inspiration
Los Angeles and Southern California just got out of one of the biggest droughts in history, and with the changing climate, more extreme weather is likely. To combat this, everyone needs to do their part. Our website and IoT devices seek to help everyone reduce water consumption by gamifying water use.
What it does
The system is an integration between a series of sensors intended to detect water usage and a website which displays water use publicly, with the goal to motivate people to compete to reduce their consumption
How I built it
The server backend is build with Java and Postgres, and hosted with Google Cloud App Engine and Google Cloud SQL. The front-end was built with ReactJS and integrated Google Map data, as well as geocoding. The IoT portion was written in Python.
Challenges I ran into
One of our ideas was to monitor water usage through an AI Vision API to get readings and report to the server. Unfortunately we weren't able to find a model that fit our use case, and a 36 hour hackathon doesn't provide the time to train a new model, so we were forced to put placeholder data for water gauge readings
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
This was the first time that anyone of us was able to create a "finished" and working website with integrated backend and frontend. In addition, we branched out and used new APIs, which helped us learn about networking, documentation and overall improve our programming skills
What I learned
Over the weekend, our team learned a great deal about the Google APIs and how to use them, which will be useful for future projects we work on. In addition, we learned about planning out the project and meeting mini-deadlines to ensure we had at least a somewhat working product at the end
What's next for Water Wars
For the next steps, integration with water meters is a must, whether through a flow meter of a digital display that is read into the computer. In addition, we would like to implement more game features for users, including a way to claim your own house and potentially giving some virtual prizes to low water users
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