Inspiration
I had an idea for something similar when I was but a smol high school freshman and wanted to see how feasible it was to create it now that I know how to do things.
What it does
Using the NCR API's consumers can scan barcodes of items from their phone as they go about their shopping. When checking out, they upload all purchases to a temporary location on a mongo database and display the document id on their screen as a barcode. This is read by the register to pull all purchases from the database simultaneously.
How I built it
React-Native using expo building tools.
Challenges I ran into
The NCR APIs kept breaking or being generally undocumented. I also spent a good deal of time wrestling with the privacy aspect of the system, but decided that since the customer is in no way associated with a document once it's been written (other than being in physical possession of a screen displaying the document ID), there shouldn't be much to worry about.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Almost every technology I used in my stack had proven to be a massive obstacle at previous hackathons, so it was nice to see my growth.
What I learned
Nobody should ever do a hackathon alone ever.
What's next for TheCowSaysMeow
Honestly the biggest issue I see moving forward is the API. There's some small way to reduce the number of requests by means of caching, but generally speaking the requests aren't going to be consistent enough to do anything meaningful. Beyond that, there's the fact that there's not really a bulk get method, so queries can't be batched in order to reduce strain on the server, a problem that is pretty transparently going to get in the way based on how often NCRs servers went down during this hackathon.
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