EcoNomics

Inspiration

We all know that taking care of our planet is important. Our group believes that building a sustainable world starts at the individual level and was wanted to create a project that represents that. That's where the idea for EcoNomics was born.

What it does

The primary goal of this project is to promote sustainability by connecting users' finances to an app that calculates their carbon footprint based on their spending habits. The app will also provide personalized recommendations on how to reduce their carbon footprint through AI-driven insights, using the OpenAI API.

How we built it

We built a backend using Firebase Functions and Node.JS that collects user financial data using Plaid. Once connected, certain categories such as gas spending, electricity, and packaged goods are analyzed and given a carbon emissions number based on national averages. The web app then presents this data to the user. Additionally, for each category, we pass on the data to a large-language-model (LLM) to retrieve recommendations on how the user can reduce their emissions for that category. Since Plaid retrieves all spending data, we are also able to chart the emissions data over time.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenges we ran into were primarily just implementing the frontend code. We got all the logic behind the LLM and Plaid working, as well as a very high fidelity functioning design prototype, but eventually ran out of time to implementing the full fledged frontend code. This was due to the learning curve we had with technologies like Plaid and abstracting the highly complex ChatGPT models.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of the fact that our APIs were fully functioning. We really learned that AI can power many different domains and that getting started with it was really useful. We're also proud of the fact that we put together a really strong working prototype using Figma, a technology we were all pretty new to. A few of us also didn't know Typescript or how to work with the Plaid API, among other things. So we definitely each learned a lot on an individual level.

What we learned

As a group of 5, we each had our own individual learnings when it comes to technologies. How to use and call an open source API, TypeScript vs. JavaScript, how to design in Figma, etc. But more importantly, we learned how to work on a project in a group. This really simulated a work environment for us, where we learned to set priorities, assign tasks, reconvene and pivot, etc. This was extremely invaluable for us as a team, since a lot of us are just entering the software engineering world.

What's next for EcoNomics

We want to complete the frontend work of this project, as we truly believe that something like this should exist where people can see the real impact of their individual emissions. After this hackathon, most of us now understand the challenges behind application development, and we are very excited to take this newfound learning and apply it to a climate change project like this one.

Built With

• ai
• figma
• firebase
• plaid
• react
• typescript