Change Maker

https://youtu.be/TUqa9pwxS5M

https://youtu.be/9OMGi8XGjks

What exactly does it do?

Our mobile application brings NASA’s data in front of the people’s eyes, especially homeowners. We created a dashboard to streamline and simplify the data given by NASA that allows homeowners to easily gain access to meteorological data such as solar irradiance, wind speed, the surrounding temperature, humidity, and the amount of clouds. Not only that, users can also monitor the electrical output of the solar panel and estimate the electrical savings of their desired type of solar panel based on the selected time range to enable more informed solar panel purchasing decisions.

How does it work?

Once the users clicked into the app, they will see a gorgeous opening screen with our logo and logo name displayed. After some introduction, now it’s time for the users to choose their home location. Once finished, the first thing the users will see is our main page where every single detail will be displayed on. After the system receives users’ home location, users can now check and monitor the meteorological data in this clean interface. Users can also choose whether they want to monitor these data in various temporal resolutions like daily and yearly. Besides that, we know some users are concerned about finance too, as it became the factor that we added the estimated savings section which is located at the end of our main page. Users are able to customize the time range to estimate the savings based on the types of solar panels chosen. From the parameters you choose, the savings will automatically be calculated based on the efficiency of your solar panels. it's so much easier to access now!

What benefit does it have?

In our app, our users can monitor the electrical output that is generated by the solar panels, and estimate future electrical savings. With this, it reduces our users’ daily expenses and also conserves our mother earth by using renewable energy. Our app also focuses to help those who are interested in seeking historical data and provide more informed solar panel purchasing decisions too.

Our 240s of Glory:

Video Link: https://youtu.be/HJ_P2kFPf_8

What do we hope to achieve?

We hope to bring out this helpful information and statistical reports provided from NASA to the general public in an accessible manner, especially to some essential fields like commercial renewable energy and sustainable building ventures. We also want to develop a user-friendly mobile application associated with sunshine to cultivate a global, systematic, and emphatic understanding of average solar irradiance on a specific day, the temperature and humidity of an environment, speed of the wind, and the clouds in the surrounding.

Most importantly, we want to encourage the earth's citizens of all ages by utilizing our mobile application to gain a clear understanding of their living environment and help them to embrace the benefits of solar power.

Tools:

• NASA POWER API service - To get all the data we need to be displayed in the app
• Flutter and Dart library - The codebase of the entire app 
• Figma - Design the wireframe of the app
• Visual Studio Code - Used as Integrated Development Environment to ease our developing process
• Git and Github - Version control and Collaboration Tool 

Coding Languages:

• Flutter
• Dart

Source Code:

https://github.com/ChangeMakerGroupEdition/Sunshine

In order to provide simple and useful information to the general public, we design a multi-platform mobile app to provide easy-understand data for the users. NASA POWER web service provides a wide variety of accurate data associated with sunshine information that fits our project very well. We use the NASA POWER API service to get all the data we need including total solar downward irradiance, wind speed, air humidity, temperature, and cloud amount based on the user location. The data is then processed and visualized in the app that is programmed in Flutter.

This Space Apps Challenge really makes our bond together. Not only that we learned new things, but on the other hand, this challenge has brought us closer and we are able to know more about each other. There are two things that we have learned throughout this Space Apps Challenge. First, two of our members think it is the coding language. This is their first time learning the language dart, which is really challenging for them. But with the help of the seniors, they were able to learn and overcome together. The second thing that all of us have learned is collaboration. This challenge really requires a lot of time considering that we still have a lot of online classes and extra tuition. The fact that we tried to have a meeting time for everyone to attend is nearly impossible. Even sometimes we are facing hardship but we try to understand one another and think from others' perspectives. At the end of the day, it’s been a delightful journey to work with everyone. 

What inspired your team to choose this challenge?

We have looked through tonnes of challenges, but we choose to put our eyes on something that is practical. So, this has been in our mind, what is the thing that we can do to facilitate people's daily lives and will have a real-time impact on our environment?

Our approach:

1. The potent seniors that are most talented in technical skills lead the rest of the team by discussing and choose which challenge is the most ideal for all the members
2. After we had found a challenge that we all agreed on, we started by thinking about the ideation process and discussing the concept of how our core features will look like and the goals we would like to achieve.
3. We split into two sub-teams: The first is in charge of clerical affairs, scriptwriting, research and ensuring well-organized management. The second is in charge of coding, front-end application support, back-end data organization and visual design.
4. We worked together and manipulated the GitHub tool to list down the changes and additional features of the application so that everything is stated clearly and concisely. 
5. Seniors then presented their prototype to juniors to strengthen team engagement and integrated their feedback to maximize the outcome and extend our activities limit in a time-constrained scenario.

Data (All based on NASA POWER API service): 

• Total solar downward irradiance 
• Air humidity
• Temperature
• Cloud amount
• Wind speed

Resources:

• NASA POWER API Documentations (https://power.larc.nasa.gov/docs/services/api/)
• Flutter Documentations (https://flutter.dev/)

#app, #solar, #impact, #sarawak, #nasa, #flutter, #data, #collaboration, #problemsolving, #teamwork

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.