Water Proof

Inspiration

New Jersey has been on the forefront of climate change, and we have all experienced the effects of the changing weather. Recently, many areas around and including our campus lost access to clean drinking water following a storm which flooded our city. This experience has made us hyper-conscious of the difficulties involved in communities facing water insecurity, and the terror of not knowing if you can trust the liquid you depend on for your survival.

What it does

Our project records pH data using a sensor, pushes that data to an immutable public record, and makes that data easily accessible through a front end while allowing end users to sign up for immediate notifications regarding changes in water pH.

How we built it

Using the Arduino IDE we made a script to take in sensory data from an UNO R3 board attached to a pH sensor. A Python script was used to scrape incoming the port data and mint it as an NFT. A Javascript based front end allows the end user to request PH data based on geographic data and sign up for notifications through Twilio.

Challenges we ran into

This was the largest project that any of us have ever worked on. None of us had any experience working with APIs, developing a project that uses multiple languages, or working with Arduino. Learning how to manage a team working on such diverse technology, most of which was new to us was extremely difficult. We also were so excited to work with block chain, we pinged it enough to lose access.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud that we were able to pull together and deliver something that functions in spite of the snags along the way.

What we learned

Tyler(Tvant#3763): I learned to never give up on my team even when things are looking bad. The first day we all seriously contemplated giving up before we had even made progress. The challenge seemed insurmountable. Daniel(Dp7049#7309): In addition to learning about blockchain, APIs, and string parsing, I learned how to multi-task and pitch in where needed to keep progress moving on both the front end and back end. Swapnil(SWAPNiL#2716):Participating in the hackathon helped me skill up my knowledge significantly, mainly my frontend skills are more robust than ever, I learned a lot about APIs and how they work in addition to calling them using JavaScript to have the data to be displayed on the frontend. Learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript in 12 hours was very challenging and fun at the same time. Nidhi(Nidhi#7519): The hackathon made me better not only at teamwork but also at concepts like blockchains and APIs. The workshops made me familiar with web and app development, AI/ML, and cryptocurrencies.

What's next for Water Proof

In the future we'd like to incorporate more sensors and custom designed hardware. Water proof will be able to give a more in-depth picture of water quality while being able to be feasibly deployed in a realistic setting.