RUnav

Inspiration

  In the middle of a dark and cold night, all 4 of us were out and trying to find out which bus we can take home. However, in this situation that did not actually happen, we find out that it's a FRIDAY NIGHT?! There are a bunch of buses that are going to stop early, and almost no 2 people have the same answer as to when that is. Because of this, with determination in our hearts, we decide to dedicate hours of blood, sweat, and tears to build this masterpiece.

What it does

 The program takes the 2 bus stops that you have selected, and then returns the bus that you can take based on which one connects the 2, and if they are active or not. However, the end goal was to be able to build one that will be able to predict how long it would take to get from that bus stop to the other, based on traffic patterns, distance and when the bus drivers pause to take a few minutes of a break.

How I built it

It began with connecting pieces of what can be a line of routes and then the times that it would take from one stop to another. And then, by integrating the API available by TRANSLOC, we are able to update information in real time.

Challenges I ran into

Since all 4 of us are freshman, the level of knowledge and number of languages we can freely work with is limited. So, with massive amounts of googling and help from the Mentors, we were able to find out that integrating APIs are incredibly useful and can give us enormous amounts of information to work with. One of the biggest challenges that we faced was juggling all of the data structures that we implemented and keeping track of which variables and structures pertained to what.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

 No one in our group actually believed that we would be able to bring anything to the table. However, we decided to still put ourselves there and just try it. The fact that we were able to learn so much and meet so many new people is something that we can say for sure is a win in our books.

What I learned

How to code with APIs and working with very large amounts of information and then sorting it into the bits and pieces that we want. This project was also a great advanced refresher on data structures.

What's next for Which Bus Am I Supposed To Take?!?!?

If we were to pursue this project, we would need to connect the front end processing to the back end, fulfill the initial goal of being able to predict the time it takes to get from one bus stop to another, and maybe be able to make it into an app form instead of a website.