Wunderbox

A local, digital and open platform building a new delivery, marketing and sales channel based on boxes

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Inspiration

Companies like Edeka, Rewe or DHL with their package stations. Different companies build there proprietary solution limited to their use cases. That is why we wanted to build an open platform everybody can use - especially to support the digital transformation of small local companies.

What it does

It provides an open platform everybody can use to promote, deliver or sell any kind of services or physical products.

How we built it

We just brought some wooden plates, a raspberry pi, some cables an electric lock and a magnetic sensor and built the box out of it. The second day then was about the software solution to check in and check out products. The software uses the sensor state of the box to determine whether the box needs to be opened and triggers the electrical lock in this case. Users can login to the platform we have built, they can check in products and generate a token to check them out again. Processes already started can be canceled by their owner so that we never lock out any customer.

In the part were we thought about the future, we created different personas who can speak to you using the google text-to-speech api. We integrated our personas with the platform. While thinking about future product iterations we came up with a use-case for the google assistent which we then prototyped with a mocking tool (please find the video attached).

Challenges we ran into

  • As we are software developers, we overestimated our electrical skills as well as the power of the raspberry pi, so that we could not use the relais we bought in advance.
  • We find it hard to limit and focus on a single use-case for Wunderbox, as we see so many use-cases for it. We think it is important to communicate the idea in an easy way.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

  • That we reached our personal goal in time, although it involved a lot of things that are not related to our profession.
  • A lot about hardware, and what it means to bring a hardware based product into life.

What we learned

That idea and implementation are not always relevant for winning a hackathon.

What's next for Wunderbox

Mainly we wanted to get feedback to an idea we really believe in and depending on how this all ends, we think about starting a company that further develops Wunderbox centring the needs of potential customers. We'd use our prototype to present in front of potential investors who know how to ask the right questions in terms of business.

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