Inspiration
A common issue students face towards the end of the semester Is running out of meal swipes. Getting to the dining hall and not being able to buy your meal due to insufficient funds/credits.
What it does
Our app takes the hassle out of all the clicking and navigation to find out that single number that decides if you're gonna be eating or not.
How We built it
The front end is a android app communicating with our firebase server, that the user logs into with username, password and their school. From there when the server is posted with that log in information a script is ran to go scrape their remaining meal balance and post to firebase. From there the app gets the value and alerts the user of their meal balance.
Challenges We ran into
All of us were doing things we have never done before, firebase and its integration, python webscraping authentication, android app dev.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The python code for website log in can be adapted to any website, modular code for future use is great and I learned some new python packages
What We learned
Websites really don't like it when you scrape them and do their best to protect against bots using headers and tokens. The amount of redirection and authentication makes tracing through websites to get the desired data very tedious and difficult.
What's next for MealManager
Integration with universities databases to make the process easier and more streamlined. At the moment log in is done via webscraping and the users must check themselves to see how their meal balance is doing. Creating an automated script on university side servers to alert any student via email/text when their balance gets low. ( Low can be default and changed by the user)
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