## Inspiration

Our inspiration was the recent heatwave, a byproduct of the global warming that has been happening over the past few decades. As an individual, it is difficult to make substanstial change in the fight against climate change. The issues are highly systemic and influenced by large corporations who's energy usage overshadow the individual's. However, once connected to a large enough community, people can join together and make waves, which is what this app is all about.

## What it does

Users can select a region of the world with unique environmental issues, such as water shortages, plastic pollution, or deforestation, and complete daily tasks that help contribute to resolving the issue. Some tasks include researching information about questions or reducing your carbon footprint by eating vegan for a meal. It aims to create a community of eco conscious members, allowing them to connect to organize wide scale events. You can also compete with them through the leaderboard system.

## How we built it

We built EcoTracker completely with SwiftUI. From the start, we built one feature at a time and added on top of them.

## Challenges we ran into

Our lack of familiarity with Swift and IOS development made the entire project pretty challenging. Debugging was incredibly difficult and time consuming, especially while sleep deprived, leading to some frustrating moments and features that were never implemented. Getting the layout right for the daily tasks was difficult, as well. Finally, managing all of the Views and how everything connected was very confusing, especially because we did almost everything on a single file.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of getting a functioning app done within the time period with only two people in the team. We didn't have much experience with Swift beforehand, so it was a struggle at first—the learning curve was slightly steep. The whole UI turned out better than expected as well, which was a nice bonus.

## What we learned

To use multiple files! It makes life much easier and finding things quicker, something that would have been helpful when tiried. We also learned a lot about IOS development in general, ranging from how the different V, H, Z Stacks worked to the different Views available. Being our first and second in-person hackathon between our team members, we also learned to fit in naps to optimize perfomance.

## What's next for EcoTasker

There are many features we'd like to implement in the future given more time. By giving some advertising space to companies, we are able to further incentivize users to complete tasks by offering monetary rewards. There could be coins users can earn and then donate to a resolving an issue.

We also want to have a chatbot using the OpenAI API that allows users to ask questions about environmental stewardship (eg: what bin do glass bottles go into?). We could let them customize the avatar based on areas they have completed/saved, like a coral reef pet for Australia.
## Inspiration

My teammate and I grew up in Bolivia, where recycling has not taken much of a hold in society unfortunately. As such, once we moved to the US and had to deal with properly throwing away the trash to the corresponding bin, we were a bit lost sometimes on how to determine which bin to use. What better way to solve this problem than creating an app that will do it for us?

## What it does

By opening EcoSnap, you can take a picture of a piece of trash using the front camera, after which the image will be processed by a machine learning algorithm that will classify the primary object and give the user an estimate of the confidence percentage and in which bin the trash should go to.

## How we built it

We decided to use Flutter to make EcoSnap because of its ability to run on multiple platforms with only one main source file. Furthermore, we also really liked its "Hot Reload" feature which allowed us to see the changes in our app instantly. After creating the basic UI and implementing image capturing capabilities, we connected to Google's Cloud Vision and OpenAI's GPT APIs. With this done, we fed Vision the image that was captured, which then returned its classification. Then, we fed this output to GPT, which told us which bin we should put it in. Once all of this information was acquired, a new screen propped up informing the user of the relevant information!

## Challenges we ran into

Given this was our first hackathon and we did not come into it with an initial idea, we spent a lot of time deciding what we should do. After coming up with the idea and deciding on using Flutter, we had to learn from 0 how to use it as well as Dart, which took also a long time. Afterwards, we had issue implementing multiple pages in our app, acquiring the right information from the APIs, feeding correct state variables, creating a visually-appealing UI, and other lesser issues.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first app we create, a huge step towards our career in the industry and a nice project we can add to our resume. Our dedication and resilience to keep pushing and absorbing information created an experience we will never forget. It was great to learn Flutter given its extreme flexibility in front-end development. Last but not least, we are proud by our dedication to the end goal of never having to doubt whether the trash we are throwing away is going into the wrong bin.

## What we learned

We learned Flutter. We learned Dart. We learned how to implement multiple APIs into one application to provide the user with very relevant information. We learned how to read documentation. We learned how to learn a language quickly.

## What's next for EcoSnap

Hopefully, win some prizes at the Hackathon and keep developing the app for an AppStore release over Thanksgiving! Likewise, we were also thinking of connecting a hardware component in the future. Basically, it would be a tiny microprocessor connected to a tiny camera connected to an LED light/display. This hardware would be placed on top of trash bins so that people can know very quickly where to throw their trash!
## Inspiration

Because of covid-19 and the holiday season, we are getting increasingly guilty over the carbon footprint caused by our online shopping. This is not a coincidence, Amazon along contributed over 55.17 million tonnes of CO2 in 2019 alone, the equivalent of 13 coal power plants.

We have seen many carbon footprint calculators that aim to measure individual carbon pollution. However, the pure mass of carbon footprint too abstract and has little meaning to average consumers. After calculating footprints, we would feel guilty about our carbon consumption caused by our lifestyles, and maybe, maybe donate once to offset the guilt inside us.

The problem is, climate change cannot be eliminated by a single contribution because it's a continuous process, so we thought to gamefy carbon footprint to cultivate engagement, encourage donations, and raise awareness over the long term.

## What it does

We build a google chrome extension to track the user’s amazon purchases and determine the carbon footprint of the product using all available variables scraped from the page, including product type, weight, distance, and shipping options in real-time. We set up Google Firebase to store user’s account information and purchase history and created a gaming system to track user progressions, achievements, and pet status in the backend.

## How we built it

We created the front end using React.js, developed our web scraper using javascript to extract amazon information, and Netlify for deploying the website. We developed the back end in Python using Flask, storing our data on Firestore, calculating shipping distance using Google's distance-matrix API, and hosting on Google Cloud Platform. For the user authentication system, we used the SHA-256 hashes and salts to store passwords securely on the cloud.

## Challenges we ran into

This is our first time developing a web app application for most of us because we have our background in Mechatronics Engineering and Computer Engineering.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud that we are able to accomplish an app of this magnitude, as well as its potential impact on social good by reducing Carbon Footprint emission.

## What we learned

We learned about utilizing the google cloud platform, integrating the front end and back end to make a complete webapp.

## What's next for Purrtector

Our mission is to build tools to gamify our fight against climate change, cultivate user engagement, and make it fun to save the world. We see ourselves as a non-profit and we would welcome collaboration from third parties to offer additional perks and discounts to our users for reducing carbon emission by unlocking designated achievements with their pet similar. This would bring in additional incentives towards a carbon-neutral lifetime on top of emotional attachments to their pet.

## Domain.com Link

<https://purrtector.space> Note: We weren't able to register this via domain.com due to the site errors but Sean said we could have this domain considered.