Inspiration
Students have a limited budget and access to products. Reutilizing resources among your peers is a better option, especially if you are not using it for the time being. You can save your time and money while bringing a positive contribution to the community. It helps Illinois Tech students at the same time to meet and engage with each other; while being eco-friendly.
What it does
we are building a platform for a peer-to-peer exchange of goods. In our web app, students have the options: -borrow: students can request to borrow items that they need by searching it in our database on the web app -lend: if a student has an item that they can give out to others, students can simply put it for 'lend' -donate: students can also donate their products to other students/charity organizations on campus like Circle K, in the future.
How we built it
Pumped by caffeine, we started with the web app: We made the skeleton of it (front-end programming), we used angular for a seamless transition between pages and a combination of node.js and firebase (back-end programming).
Backend logistics
Serve Config: -Digital Ocean as a service provider. -Asynchronous NodeJS web server for REST API calls. -MongoDB as dataStore.
The server handles different requests from an Android app as well as the Web App. A photo can be uploaded from the android device to the FireBase Storage system, which is later used as a picture for the post. The nodejs server also handles socket.io requests. The android application communicates with the server via sockets to provide real-time updates and handle requests instantly.
For the phone app: We use the android studio to build an app for uploading pictures to the server. We thought it will be easier to take pictures from a phone rather than from a webcam on the laptop.
Challenges we ran
We wanted to implement the Walmart-API but we found out that it has a limited database since we can have access to products that are only sold at Walmart.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It was the first time using firebase for a project. The workshop on firebase inspired us.
What we learned
We strengthen our skills in web programming and one of our members tried Android programming for the first time and learn certain skills on that overnight.
What's next for Vivre
We can further implement features like an automatically generated description of the product when we take a picture of it (machine learning). By scaling up a product, companies can also choose to give away testing products to widen their base and reduce errors. To encourage sharing, we are going to implement a rating system that will be aligned with the give-and-take policy. Basically, user will have to be willing to share at least 4 items to be eligible for borrowing We can also introduce a fully designed app version for this product.
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