You're Running Out of Data

Motivation

Tired of hitting your data cap halfway through the month? Stay ahead of your carrier plan and in control with this application! With real-time tracking and smart reminders, our goal is to make the user experience more convenient. We know how frustrating it can be to suddenly run out of data or minutes, so this app can help users regain control over their phone usage. Now, users can stay connected without the worry of extra charges, and enjoy a stress-free mobile experience.

What it does

Introducing You're Running Out Of Data, a browser-based application that tracks your data usage and call minutes, and sets up real-time alerts for specific usage limits. By logging in with your mobile provider, you will be able to access your carrier plan consumption. Receive email reminders to help you stay on top of your data and/or call limit and take charge of your data plan with ease!

How it was built

The website interface was built using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, which inserts and retrieves data from the database. For the back-end, Python is used for the database manager, usage tracking calculator, and notification system. We developed a custom database manager using JSON files to securely store and organizes user data. This enables the usage tracking calculator to obtain the data, driven by optimized algorithms that calculate remaining data and call minutes based on user input and logged usage. Finally, the notification system uses the SMTP server that authenticates with Gmail credentials and sends an email to the directed address for alerts on data limits.

Challenges

This project was mainly connected through GitHub, and the team faced many challenges working with it as some members were new to this system. With a basic foundation learned from the GitHub workshop, we were able to figure out how to work on different branches and push to a main project file to enable efficient collaboration. Additionally, our team did not have experience in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, so we attended a React workshop to construct a website interface. The most challenging problem was to have the front-end and back-end be able to communicate with each other. We faced many errors and had to experiment with different methods to have the system be connected as a whole.

Built With

css
csv
flask
html
json
mime
os
python

Submitted to

NewHacks 2024

Created by

I implemented the logic in the backend. Using python, I created the functions to calculate whether and send and email when the user's data usage or call minutes was below their target amount. I also implemented the communication between the front and back ends of the program and generally was helping my group mates where they needed assistance in their respective parts of the project.
It was my first time trying to link front and back ends together and making an interactive program with the user (basing out data fetching off of the user's inputs)

Xin Mo
I worked on the notification system, using Python, Mime, and SMTP to send email reminders. Though I had experience programming in Python, I did not know how to implement the notification system. After research, I learned to authenticate the system to send the email with specific conditions according to the data usage. A challenge that I bumped into was how I could implement this system without leaking confidential information of the Google app passkey. I used .gitignore and .env files, so it avoids committing private information from the working directory.

Kristie Ho
In this project, I focused on the front end, building the user interface and implementing interactive features using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which was my first experience with these languages. I designed the structure of the web pages with semantic HTML for clarity and organization, applied CSS to enhance visual appeal and responsiveness, and wrote JavaScript scripts for functionalities like form validation, data storage in localStorage, and user notification preferences.

Allie Okumura
Jacqueline Peng

Updates

Xin Mo started this project — Oct 27, 2024 10:46 AM EDT

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