Eco-Warriors was inspired by the simple thought - what if a small idea could scale to a global level, making a real difference in the process. This is how the app was born, bringing to life a fun and rewarding game that helps users to team up and clear litter in their local area.

The app also provided an opportunity for us to push our technical knowledge as a team, going beyond our comfort zones to build a robust and highly scalable stack. Utilising docker for the first time and tying together cloud services from AWS to Google to Digital Ocean, we made full use of modern deployment methods and built for a forward-looking approach.

We hope that the app idea could easily scale further, helping build community spirit and making a difference in the process.

What it does

Users can log in and use computer vision to track their litter-picking efforts. Inspired by mobile games such as Pokemon Go and Clash of Clans, users can join one of three worldwide teams to claim hexagons over the UK map for their particular clan. We can track statistics for individual users and teams on a leaderboard as well furthering the community aspect and incentive to engage in eco-friendly activities.

How we built it

For the backend, we used C# and .Net to write the server and Digital Ocean for deployment and MongoDB to store data For the Map: We used react-leaflet to render GeoJSON over a map of the UK. We used polyfill functions to fill the GEOJson map with hexagons with a predefined resolution. Thanks to fancy projection maths we can use the latitude and longitude coordinates to place a marker for the user and identify the current hex the user is in For litter recognition: Used a custom YOLOv8 model trained on images and videos of litter

Challenges We ran into

• Lat Long needs to be flipped randomly sometimes
• Lack of a GPU for Segment Anything inference (would've taken too long)
• Learning C#
• CICD weirdness with AWS #Accomplishments that we are proud of
• Learning C#
• Navigating Weird map stuff #Whats next Provide more ways of tracking sustainability

Built With

• asp.net
• c#
• css
• docker
• html
• leaflet.js
• python
• react
• typescript
• yolov8