SpaceChat

Inspiration

In Lean Startup, they preach, that you have to find your niche...well, what's more niche for a chat app than astronauts?

Also, we follow our passion: create creative things with exiting tech and since there was no functional cross-platform Morse-Light-Decoder app, we've decided to create one.

What it does

Our app encodes text to an intermediate format, we came up with, then encodes that to morse code, then to a flashlight pattern representing the morse code. Others have done this before, since that's the easier part of the story... ...but we came up with the decoder as well. It can detect the flashlight pattern, transform it into morse code and then decodes it to text.

And all this ist done with standard HTML5 APIs on-device and in-browser.

How we built it

With the help of lots of coffee and sweets...thanks to the hosts :D

Aside from that, we used Ionic Framework to create the cross-platform app experience, a simple HTML landing page, the best hoster in the UNIVERSE: Uberspace for hosting the repos, the landing page and providing letsencrypt SSL-certificates for all the stuff.

Challenges we ran into

Dealing with the HTML5 MediaStream API, since it is not that well documented. Figuring out, if we even can use these modern browser APIs fo the job or if we have to fall back on native app development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

coming soon...

What we learned

coming soon...

What's next for SpaceChat

• Speech to text...since we've figured out, that astronauts have difficulties, using their fingers in space (...bulky hand gloves, that are not even capacitive and therefore can't be used on regular smartphone displays represent a major obstacle...)

Built With

• css3
• deeplearn.js
• html5
• ionic
• javascript
• typescript