RUGood

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Inspiration

This pandemic has been tough on everyone and with all our connections being limited to "online-only", it can be difficult to check in with your friends when they aren't online. That's why we created "RUGood?" - a hybrid hardware and software solution that lets you check in with your friends at any time by pinging them.

We wanted a fun and simple way to keep in touch with our friends during covid. It's hard to spend time with your friends and you don't always want to send them a whole message. Instead, you can send a little ping to ask them r u good?

Our 3 man team had a great spread of skills and wanted to incorporate as much as we could.

What it does

RUGood lets friends send ‘pings’ to each other to let them know they’re there or just to annoy them. The star of the show is the physical device, which we have been calling the “Box”. It’s meant to be a little desktop gadget that lets you scroll through a list of your friends and ping them. It also receives pings from your friends. When it receives a ping it lights up and makes a sound. There is also a virtual box that emulates the same functionality from a website so your friends who don’t have it can join in. video

How we built it

Server

We built this using a modern Python AWSGI framework, specifically FastAPI. All of the front-end is raw html-css-js.

Box

The box is made up of a bunch of hardware components. The main board is a Nodemcu ESP8266, wired together on a breadboard with some leds, buttons, and a lcd display. The board is running micro Python to connect to the server.

Challenges we ran into

Exams

Since the three of us are in the same program we also have the same exams. We had the fortune of having a computer hardware and math exam on Friday. We were given 36 hours to complete the math exam and a good chunk of our hacking time was completing the math exam.

Covid

One of our team members has covid and couldn’t work at their regular level and pace.

First time

This was all of our team's very first Hackathon, and the experience was very new to us.

Choosing a Color

The website looked great with every color we chose so we just ended choosing all of them! Every time you refresh the page you’ll get a new color.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our very first hackathon and we’re really proud to have finished something. We are all in our first year of computer science at Ryerson. We have never met and have only talked on the program's discord server. We are really happy

What we learned

Micro controller, FastAPI, OAuth2, Managing Cookies, WebSockets, MicroPython, hacking as a team. Doing a hardware project.

What's next for RUGood

Discord OAuth has a scope to see a list of friends when you authenticate. Originally I was banking on this to work so we wouldn't have to bake in the whole adding a friend feature but it's behind a whitelist. A next step would be getting on that whitelist.