TipShip

Our database is GCP SQL Server

Inspiration

We play MMO games regularly, using Discord voice channels to communicate, and we have often wanted to sell each other legendary or rare equipment. Instead of opening Venmo or remembering to pay our friends the next time we see each other (shoutout the pandemic), we wanted a quick, easy, and safe way to send money through platforms that we already regularly use. Many game platforms do not support players exchanging real currency to each other, so the next best thing for us is Discord, and I'm sure many other gamers have felt the same way!

What it does

TipShip, with just a few commands and clicks, the user can pay another user in the server a designated amount of money. The bot will create an order through Paypal, and the user can simply login and execute the payment. This discord bot is also accompanied by a web app that displays the user's transactions, spendings and earnings, and analysis with predictions on future spending trends.

How we built it

The backend is in Python utilizing the Django framework. The front end is a mix of HTML/CSS and JavaScript. We use Jquery AJAX requests to asynchronously update the front end. Moreover, we use Chart.js to create a chart of spending over a period of time. The discord bot lives on a Flask runtime and utilizes it to GET and POST to our Django WebApp.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we ran into was the difficulty on moving the Discord bot to a Flask runtime. This, with our Django CORS policy, allowed us to communicate and update asynchronously.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have accomplished such a wide project. TipShip covers so many areas and we were happy to pull all that together. Some milestones in our project include:

Finishing Dashboard in Django WebApp
Finishing communication between Discord Bot Flask Runtime and Django WebApp via APIs
Building a preliminary ML prediction model to track spending and encourage saving
## What we learned We learned a lot about building and utilizing APIs. Researching CORS policy and other influence affected the way we really though about WebDev. ## What's next for TipShip Although we have the basics for the ML analysis, we would really love to see it expanded. Given time, users could have expected to see saving strategies and fraud detection.