RESTQ Network

A mesh network and rest api website to help people find help during a disaster

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Inspiration

We wanted to build an application that could make finding people in danger much faster. After talking to some friends that went to Houston to help and hearing the theme at hackUTA, we started brainstorming on how we could talk to people when traditional lines of communication were unavailable.

What it does

We have two components:

A website with a REST API called RESTQ.net that hosts data related to a disaster and allows victims and rescuers interact with each other and learn.

Software for the Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c which hosts the site locally and can be connected through a hotspot so victims can send updates and rescuers can see local victims, all without internet.

How I built it

The website is a Angular 4 webapp with a Node.js backend. It, along with a mongodb server are hosted on AWS at restq.net. We built Angular components for each part of the front end and then used mongo to store our data and make it accessible through GET. We got that working last minute and aren't able to make the process dynamic enough for a tutorial, but should be easily to fully thresh out.

The Qualcomm device is running debian and has node.js, mongodb, a local website copy, and some applications to make an access point that people can connect to. The access point is set up to redirect the user to the site no matter what domain they try. The device is also set up to try to connect to wifi every once in a while and update itself with the AWS site along with sending local data it collected offline.

Challenges I ran into

A lot of our computers were having power issues and hindered us a lot. We also ran into an issue trying to host on AWS on an educate account.

The frameworks for our website were hard to deal with at times. Getting MongoDB working with Angular correctly with Mongoose was much more difficult than we thought.

We had a few issues dealing with the Qualcomm device. It didn't have a dedicated power supply so we had to make one by hand. Additionally, the memory was limited so we had to get rid of its GUI and some other things to make the website work.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the finished site and hardware component and it is exciting how easy it would be to add features and continue to watch this project grow. Having AWS servers for a year makes this much more possible to deploy!

What I learned

We learned that we need to really think before we use too many frameworks in a short time frame. Angular makes this app easier to build on later, but really ran us thin feature wise before this hackathon was over. I think for future hackathons we will try to get our product stable first before we focus directly on scale.

What's next for RESTQ Network

We want to add authentication and security to make sure the site content stays online and that no victim data is deleted. We also want to fully complete the REST API with a tutorial so more people can build on the standard.

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