StudyNav

User Interface
Occupancy Monitor

Inspiration

Throughout our university careers, we have all wasted countless hours hunting for a seat when we should have been focused on our work. This led us to the realisation that students lack the information they need to use the little time they have effectively.

What it does

StudyNav provides a list of study locations along with real time occupancy tracking to help students find an open place to work. By integrating a live interactive map, our system allows users to visualise where study spots are around campus, and check their availability. Instead of blindly walking from building to building, students can see where the busy spots are and head to quieter, less crowded alternatives.

Challenges

We struggled with mostly technical challenges, including but not limited to integrating the Google Maps API interaction with our site dynamically, learning several new technologies in a limited amount of time, and verifying the whole pipeline from hardware to backend to frontend worked as intended.

What we learned

We learned the importance of scope creep; there were features such as graphs and adding multiple universities that we just didn't have the time for, but, fortunately, we were able to keep all of the essentials and some of the nice-haves.

What's next

Look into securely having our hardware at library entrances, shipping our site to a VPS and using multiple networks to interact with the ESP32 (UofM wifi).