Green Town

An app that eradicates garbage making the planet a greener place.

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Inspiration

About 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year in our world. A majority of this food waste comes from major restaurants that have leftover cooked food every day. Our goal was to stop this crisis. We decided to come up with an app that creates an environment in which users can play an exciting game that promotes trash recycling and health to receive free food as their incentive.

What it does

Green town makes recycling fun! Our app is a game that is intended to transform our users into being more responsible towards their environment.

Users must find a recycling bin near them to trash their recyclable material using the directions given to them by the Google maps that we’ve integrated into our app. In order for us to keep track of what has been trashed by our users, we require them to either scan the QR code on their material or upload an image of the serial number on the material. They will not be able to upload a picture or scan the QR code of their product until they reach the destination of their nearest recycling bin.

Once they scan/upload the information about their recycling material, they will immediately receive points. However, the speed at which the user gets to the destination will also be noticed. They will not receive points if they get to their destination, if they’ve traveled at a higher speed than predicted. This is to ensure that our users are healthy even if it is a few miles or less for them to walk. In case our user is not able to walk, they may invite a friend that will give them a ride to their destination. However, their friend would also have to download the app in order for them to give the user a ride and to receive points as well.

When the user has a good amount of points, they will have multiple restaurants to go to in order to receive free food. They will show a QR code that is on their app to the restaurant employee, when they scan this QR code, the user’s points get deducted and they get their free food.

Users can play this game regardless of where they are located, making it a way for everyone in this world to work together to make our world a better place to live in.

How We built it

The app is built on Flutter SDK, which makes it a cross-platform environment for both Android and iOS. For the back-end data management, Firebase and Cloud Firestore have been collaboratively used, and also along with the help of Firebase, we have integrated Google Sign-in feature with which users can get into the app without any sort of pre-sign up required. Google Cloud Platform services, namely Google Maps, Firebase ML Vision, and DialogFlow have been used for real-time maps, image-text extractor, and a chatbot. Using all these GCP services in a single project makes the integration of Flutter and GCP much more effective and powerful. We have also used Docker to dockerize the entire app and deploy it on Digital Ocean’s App Platform for better scalability and better pipelining. For prototyping the entire app, we have used Figma and Adobe Illustrator for UI/UX design handling. The deployed app link is: https://hackatown-vddv5.ondigitalocean.app/

Challenges we ran into

Using Firebase ML with the latest Flutter Dev branch led to a memory leak which took quite a while to fix. Dockerizing the app was a little time consuming and since DigitalOcean App Platform did not directly support Flutter, so we had to use Docker to dockerize the app and then run a smoke test on the app.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

If this app were to be released to the public, it would definitely create a huge change amongst people, on their responsibilities towards our environment and their health. ~Sanjana

The app can definitely help solve a lot of garbage disposal in our environment, especially considering how bad our environment is affected due to this issue. ~Amey

What we learned

As a team, we collaboratively worked together to make this project a success and as a result, we have improved our team-building skills, and excellent communication among the teammates has been proved to be fruitful. We learned new UI/UX methodology like Figma and GCP services with its various APIs(Google Maps, Machine Learning Vision, Translate) and SDK support by its powerful integration within various cross-platform development services like Flutter and React. We have also used Dialog Flow for chatbot which is also a powerful GCP service with highly trained NLP. We also integrated Digital Ocean for app deployment with the help of Docker for better scalability and perfect pipelining for the app. Along with this, we also had a great time developing the app.

What's next for Greentown

Using the recent trends of Machine Learning to remind users to throw rubbish whenever they are near a smart bin. Sign-in with Apple for iOS users for faster signing will also be implemented.

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