ALARM-ing

Inspiration

Annoyed by the incessant ringing of our friends' alarms whilst living on campus, we decided to turn the tables and weaponise those very same alarms into punishing individuals who refuse to wake up and turn their alarms off.

What it does

Set an alarm for the next day. If you wake up earlier than your friends, you can choose their alarm ringtone (i.e., change it into a more annoying one :P) and give them a really good wake-up call. 🤡

How we built it

We used Flutter as our application framework, paired with a Cloud Firestore database. The main programming language used is Dart.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first attempt at coding an application meant for iOS, and 2 of our team members' first times coding on Flutter using Dart. Hence, we had to spend a substantial amount of time at the start familiarising ourselves with the framework and syntax, which resulted in less time to code and test our application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite Hack & Roll 2023 being most of our first experiences in hackathons, we were able to apply the knowledge learnt from our modules and programmes to aid us in this project. This includes concepts such as functional abstraction, which allowed us to easily rectify mistakes as well as make the code more readable and understandable. Our understanding of different types of databases also enabled us to be more open to new tech stacks even in the narrow 24-hour timeframe we were provided. Finally, we were able to apply what we learnt from previous project experiences (e.g., NUS Orbital) in this hackathon, such as using Git and Github to perform source control and collaborate with others.

What we learned

Our most significant takeaway is learning how to create a minimum viable product that is able to showcase the most important and foundational features of our application within a limited timeframe. We also recognised the importance of planning the project and ensuring that everyone came to a common consensus on what the application should contain. This helped significantly in splitting up the workload as we had a clear understanding of each others' roles and our shared end-goal for our final product.

What's next for ALARM-ing

We would like to develop more customisable features for users, such as uploading their own ringtones (or recording sounds!), and adding pictures/GIFs to the next person's screen after they turn off the alarm. Our application can also be made easier to use by setting up reminders for users to set an alarm for the next day. Finally, we hope to implement background app refreshing to allow our application to run even when the screen is turned off.