Carbon Calculator

Coding · 2024–2025 · Co-built with Luis Rosario-Alers: ideas, docs, presenting

Built with Python, Qt, SQLite

A desktop app that helps farms estimate the carbon emissions from their fuel, then log and chart them over time. Luis and I built it as a proof of concept for a school academic-team competition.

The idea

Small farms rarely have an easy way to measure their emissions. The goal of this app is to take a farmer’s fuel use and farming method and estimate the result. It can also import and export data, pull in local weather, and chart results.

The General tab with farming inputs filled in and the transactions table below — Entering a calculation. The table below holds every saved calculation.

The same General tab in dark theme — Dark theme.

The General tab with the interface in Spanish — The app also runs in Spanish.

How it calculates

Emissions = fuel used × the fuel's emission factor × a farming-technique modifier. 100 L of diesel under conventional farming is 100 × 2.68 × 1.0 = 268 kg CO2e; under regenerative farming (0.6) it's 160.8 kg, 40% less.

Fuels: gasoline, diesel, natural gas, propane, ethanol, and biodiesel.
Techniques: conventional, conservation, organic, precision, and regenerative.
Optional temperature adjustment; output in mg, g, kg, or metric tons.

The technique modifiers and temperature adjustment are our own modeling choices, not published figures, so it's a proof of concept, not a certified calculator.

Bar chart of emissions from 100 liters of each fuel, diesel highest at 268 kg — 100 L of each fuel under conventional farming.

Bar chart of 100 liters of diesel across five farming techniques, with percent reduction from conventional — The same 100 L of diesel under each farming technique.

Line chart of the temperature multiplier from -10 to 45 degrees Celsius with the 20 degree baseline marked — The temperature adjustment, with its 20 °C baseline.

Charting results

Calculations are saved to a local database, and the Visualization tab charts emissions over time per user, filtered by fuel, unit, and date range.

Emissions-over-time chart for several users in kilograms over the past year — Charts shown here use randomly generated demo data, not real emissions.

What I worked on

I worked with Luis throughout the development time on concepts, ui, documentation, presentation, codebase analysis, and flow charts.

Diagram of how a calculation flows from the tabs through the controllers and calculation model to the SQLite database — How a calculation moves through the app.

View the code