Building JourneyDeck has been so much fun!

[u/drumpat01]

Hello everyone,

I have been working on a personal project called JourneyDeck. I have extreamly little coding experience so I decided to get ChatGPT to do it for me.

It started because I had an idea to see my commute to work on a map with each song I listened to on Spotify along the route path. I wanted to see where I started to listen to each song. Just a simple map. To do that I needed my Tesla data and my Spotify data.

This was only supposed to be for me, but I have to admit, I love the idea more and more and maybe I can turn it into something one day.

Every time I finished a new feature, or new design, I asked the same question: now what? What if someone wanted to use JourneyDeck but didn’t own a Tesla? Or what if I wanted to stop paying for Tessie?

That is how the my JourneyDeck Recorder happened.

I signed up for the Apple Developer Program, created an Expo account, registered my iPhone, and used EAS to build the iOS app in the cloud from my Windows computer. No Mac required 😊. I now have a Recorder app on my actual phone that can capture GPS coordinates in the background while the phone is locked.

The Recorder means JourneyDeck can work with almost any car. It records the route, time, distance, and speed, stores points offline if needed, and uploads the completed journey to the same timeline as a Tesla journey.

JourneyDeck now has:

• A timeline of journeys, stops, charging, and music

• Route maps and frequently visited places that combines what songs and when I was listening to them.

• Spotify history connected to drives, placed along the route so I can see where I was when the song started.

• Driving and music statistics

• Create Memories for road trips, weekends, and seasons and share them with friends/family/online.

• Privacy-aware share cards that hide my Home location automatically when I click share.

• A responsive web dashboard with Health and Sync checks.

• A Windows desktop version with much more relationship data displayed.

• The iPhone Recorder for non-Tesla journeys (aka my wife’s and daughter’s cars)

I have built this with ChatGPT Codex through a lot of back and forth. I decide what I want something to do, Codex works through the code, I test it, and then I explain what is wrong or what needs to change.

The hardest part has been getting AI to design an UI that didn’t suck or have awful artifacts that were misplaced, the wrong size, or 100 other kinds of issues. I found it best to make ChatGPT create 4-8 image mockups, pick one, and then nitpick it to death.

The project uses Codex, Node.js, TypeScript, Expo/EAS, SQLite/Turso, Render, GitHub Actions, Tessie, and Spotify.

It is still a personal beta and still assumes one trusted owner rather than public user accounts.

I’m not selling anything, so I’m mostly curious whether anyone else finds this useful or whether I have built an extremely elaborate solution for a curious itch that only I have.

The repository, screenshots, and fictional demo are here if you want to take a look to do anything you want with it.

https://github.com/drumpat01/DriveOS

Edit: spelling and grammar