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The Main Screen
Inspiration
Sailors are alone on the high seas for months at a stretch. Many a sailor has expressed their lonesomeness in their journals at sea. We came up with an innovative way for sailors on different ships to chat with each other if they're in the same stretch of sea!
Our inspiration, Jack Sparrow.
What it does
Ahoy Scallywags enables sailors to communicate with other sailors on nearby ships (radius of ~10km or 5.3 nautical miles). Sailors can hang out, sing pirate songs across ships, or form a floating nation!
It uses the Fetch API to search for geofences near the sailor with Radar.io and if it doesn't find any it creates a geofence around the user. All the users in a geofence will be able to chat.
The app shows you a map where you can see all the other sailors. Once close to another ship it switches to a dual interface where it creates a chat room alongside the map where you can talk to your fellow sailors.
How we built it
Ahoy Scallywags is built with JavaScript, HTML, and SCSS with the chat server in Node.js and Socket.io. It connects users based on geofences created in Radar.io.
Challenges we ran into
We were new to almost every single technology we used, like Radar.io API, Here API, Node.js, Socket.io, and even MongoDB.
Making HTTP requests to the Radar.io API was tricky. Being new to Node.js, Socket and their documentation wasn't ideal. The learning curve was steep and treacherous. Being new to Node, Mongo DB, and Mongo DB Atlas isn't a fun time - neither is being completely new to the concept of APIs or HTTP requests.
Since we were brand new to a lot of these technologies we had to spend a lot of time working through the errors but in the end we managed to pull through!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Some of us who were completely new to most of the exotic stuff (if not all!) we used was able to actually develop an MVP. We learned tonnes about the APIs, technologies, cloud computing, and more. We were complete strangers before the hackathon but we still managed to work cohesively and create a project!
What we learned
We learned so much about developing web apps with the Radar.io API, making HTTP calls in general and making a server with Node.js. We also learned how to make a real time chat with Socket.io.
What's next for Ahoy Scallywags!
We hope to add some new features to this project including voice chat!
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