Weather Watchlist

Inspiration

I wanted to learn how APIs worked and how to web scrape and so I thought of the perfect project with a problem I had. Sometimes I never knew what movie to watch because I never knew the right movie to match the vibes for the day, and with the weather data getting a scary movie for stormy days or a romance for rainy days at random would really help with that decision

What it does

It is an application where the backend does an API request for weather data from a zipcode the user enters (so it can be used all around the united states), and with this data it will web scrape for movies from a selected URL for the best movies in their respected genre where the genre matches the current weatherCode (a number given by the API to indicate weather conditions). The application would still give you the weather (current temp, High, Low) just to keep in theme

How we built it

We started off by googling which APIs were free and going from just doing API requests to different websites until we figured out how to successfully API request and get weather data and parse that into Python to be used for later. From there we tried to do movie APIs but learned that web scraping would be far easier for what we had access to. After that we tried to learn Flask to do the front end but ended on tkinter to just show a proof of concept instead. For some specific data we googled some documentation of the APIs and got txt files to do some file I/O to get specific data

Challenges we ran into

Using the movie API costed money for all the information we wanted and decided to get specific imdb URLs to scrape those for more highly rated movies in their respected genres. Flask also became an issue as it was difficult to understand, so we decided on going into tkinter just to show that the application works

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the APIs and web scraping to work as we're new to those concepts. From there just getting some knowledge on Flask was still a great achievement. Getting the entire app to work, even though locally, was a sigh of relief