About Us
Team 3C, Division 2, Grades [12, 11, 11, 11]
What it does
It finds the closest public restrooms based on a series of constraints, such as open times, accessibility, parking, etc. An interactive map allows you to choose a specific location, and a calendar allows you to choose a specific time. This makes planning travel, or even finding a restroom in a quick pinch easy and accessible.
How we built it
We used HTML, CSS, JavaScript to create the website. We also used Flask with Python to create the backend and logic for searching the database. Our database came from the Australian government. We also used Leaflet to display the interactive map.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest hurdles we faced was running Python code from JavaScript. We solved it by creating a restful server that would allow the JavaScript webpage to request searches from our python database searching script.
Another challenge was decoding the time constraints. We had to take a string like 'OPEN: Mon-Thu 5am-7pm, Fri 5am-6pm, Oct-Apr Sat 6am-4pm, Oct-Apr Sun 7am-4pm, May-Sep Sat 7am-4pm, May-Sep Sun 8am-4pm' and find if a specific time fit the constraint. This required a lot of string manipulation, but we made it work.
What we learned
We learned how to
- Create a map interface with Leaflet
- Create a Restful API
What's next for LooCater
We would love to have users add to the database so we can slowly build a complete map for regions without the sufficient data. We would have users rate each other's data to ensure the data is valid.
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