Bluetooth Luggage Tracker

Departure Process
Arrival Process
Firestore Database

Inspiration

Airline travel is often stressful for first-time passengers and for those who don’t fly often. One of the most worrying aspects of airline travel for passengers is not knowing when and where their luggage is in real-time. We wanted to provide passengers with real-time status notifications of their luggage to provide them with a sense of security and confirmation.

What it does

Flyers create an account in the app and register their Bluetooth-enabled microprocessors before their flight. They then place their registered microprocessors inside of their checked luggage. When the checked luggage is loaded on the plane, the plane's built-in Bluetooth scanner detects the registered microprocessors inside of the luggage and notifies the cloud that the luggage is now on-board. The cloud then immediately relays this information back to the flyer.

After landing, the checked luggage is transported from the airplane to the baggage claim. Near the baggage claim, there will be another Bluetooth scanner that confirms that the luggage has actually arrived. Flyers with the app will then be immediately notified that their luggage is approaching the baggage claim.

Our public web-server for our examples is: http://tamuflights.tech

How We built it

We used Android Studio for the Client-Side app and Bluetooth API to detect other devices. Each Bluetooth Luggage Scanner sends data to a set of endpoints in Node.js, which then reads/writes from Google Firebase Firestore to query device data. Our application is designed to work with multiple airlines, and each document in firebase is a flight ID that contains the airline initials and flight number. We also built the main controller with React.js for the admin to view the luggage on every single flight.

Challenges We ran into

Scanning area for Bluetooth enabled devices
Sending Bluetooth device MAC Addresses to the cloud
Connecting to the back-end API endpoints with android studio
Declaring Permissions for all of the Android Software APIs
Writing APIs for older versions of Android

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We are really proud of how we were able to achieve automated Bluetooth scanning; this feature makes our app stand out from traditional user apps. We are also proud of how we finished writing our code from beginning to end, and how we set up a smooth process prioritized for the customer experience. We are also really proud with all of the back-end work and how we were able to handle a lot of request under the endpoints that were stored on the Google Cloud Compute Engine.