GasUp

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Meet the Team!

Inspiration

As a college student, I have frequently found myself in the situation of “Who wants to drive?”, “Could you send me gas money?”, “How much should I pay you for gas?”. Riding with friends and splitting the cost of gas is a very common ordeal. The price of items such as food, drinks, rent, furniture, etc.. is very easily split between friends and groups of people. There is a set price for those items and can be easily calculated just by dividing the total cost by the number of individuals involved. However, the amount you owe someone in gas money is a lot harder to determine. This number is dependent on factors such as total miles for the trip, estimated MPG of your car, and average cost of gas in your area.

What it does

GasUp is a payment management application that will handle the frequent question of “Could you send me gas money?” A user will only be responsible for initially inputting the make/model of their car, adding friends, and recording their drives. Using the make/model of your car, estimated gas price, GPS data, and additional algorithms GasUp will compute exactly how much each friend owes and provide a visually-pleasing interface to display this information.

How we built it

We built GasUp using a FERN stack. Firebase for data storage, Express.js and Node.js for server side processing, and React Native for developing the interface. Additionally, we used Google Cloud to host our Node.js/Express server.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenges were quality public data sources for car and gas price information. We had the most trouble finding a public api for gas prices. Also, our application uses geolocation to calculate total miles for a trip and with the limited time we were unable to get real coordinates. To simulate routes we had to use predefined coordinates for testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the inability to implement everything we intended, we still were able to produce a working application with core functionality.

What we learned

We all learned a lot more about Mobile Development and how to use various cloud resources. We were all new to the Google Cloud Suite.

What's next for GasUp

Our team will like to continue with GasUp and take the time to finish what we did not have time for. Due to the nature of a Hackathon we had to focus less on the quality of the application and more on producing a working application. With proper planning and documentation we believe GasUp could influence the way friends share ride's with one another.