TicketTime

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  this is the starting page of the app. Most of the time you will be clicking on a marker to check the ticket data of a parking lot

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  This is a view of the ticket data so you can decide which lot to park in

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  This is the view you will see when you are reporting a ticket and it will ask for info so we can properly show the data

Inspiration

Parking at MSU has become harder every year with the lack of space as well as the expense of Pay-by-Plate. The aggressive enforcement for a crime that exists purely for the financial benefit of the city is frustrating.

What it does

Using crowdsourced data we are able to display to the user real incidents from their most frequented parking lots. We rely on students to share their incidents and allow the data to benefit everyone in finding a place to park in a increasingly expensive endeavor.

How we built it

Using Flutter and Firebase we created a simple app that is able to allow users to both submit tickets that they have gotten as well as made it easy for them to view past data through the use of Firestore in Firebase. The app is fully synced to the database so new tickets that are submitted arrive in realtime.

Challenges we ran into

Since this is both of our first times using Flutter and Firebase we had many setbacks during our development. Other than the fact that we have to learn new languages and technologies, we ran into many issues with having access to data that we needed. Google’s Places API was not good enough because we couldn’t reliably get all of the parking structures/lots in East Lansing. We also had issues with properly querying our data that we were able to overcome after many redesigns of how we stored our data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Currently our app 100% of the basic functionality which we feel was our biggest priority. While there are some features that we hope to roll out in the future when we take our app to market, we feel that currently we have a very strong base. In 24 hours we were able to learn a completely new language, a completely new format of storing data, and also able to properly manage our time so that we are now able to present a functioning product.

What we learned

We had to both learn how to program in Dart from scratch as well as figure out the most efficient way to store our data in Firestore’s format. We also had to learn a lot about synchronization and streams that would allow our app to update our models in realtime.

What's next for TicketTime

We really believe that our project will be able to help many students on campus. We have every intention of regularly maintaining and improving our project in the future. We also are in the process of setting up a timeline for the release of the project so that students can begin using it soon.

Built With

• firebase
• flutter
• google-maps