Beacon

Inspiration

A lot of people these days spend a lot of time on their phones. We're always looking to see what our friends are doing. So we figured, why not just go there? Beacon let's you know when a friend is doing something cool nearby so more people can do more cool things together.

What it does

Beacons allows you to place a marker in a location where you're doing something interesting. You can give your Beacon a title and some tags to describe what you're doing, then when a friend comes within range of the Beacon they'll get a notification on their phone.

How we built it

On the front-end we are developing apps for Android and iOS that allow you to place new Beacons, see a map of nearby Beacons, and search for Beacons by tags. On the back-end, we have a few RESTful endpoints for our API \ written in Java. We store our users and Beacons with location information in MongoDB, and we use GeoSpatial queries to find out which Beacons are nearby.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some issues getting our AWS instance up and running, as well as it being a constant battle on the mobile development side.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did create several endpoints for our API and have them hosted on AWS as well as hosting our MongoDB instance on the cloud. Hopefully the mobile apps will be connected soon too!

What we learned

We learned a bunch of things, including but not limited to: how difficult it is to get a Tomcat server to work properly, that Zach really doesn't like programming in Swift, and that productivity drops severely after 4 am.

What's next for Beacon

We plan to complete our API and mobile apps so we can get people using it and doing cool stuff as soon as possible! This will include serving push notifications to both the iOS and Android apps regarding nearby Beacons.

Built With

Submitted to

Spring 2016 hackNY Student Hackathon

Created by

I built the interface between the server and the database. I learned a lot about MongoDB, which actually turned out to be a great choice for our project. I also prepared methods for registering and authenticating users as well as finding beacons by locations and tags.

Taylor Ninesling
I worked on creating the RESTful API backend for the app using Java and the Servlet API in conjunction with Apache Tomcat 9. Additionally I set up the Amazon Web Services services, such as the Tomcat Server and the MongoDB instance. I was also in charge of making sure that everything could run server side with all the proper dependencies.

Christopher Davie
I worked on all of the iOS development. I personally am not a mac nor iPhone user, so I had zero experience in Swift and Objective C. After going so far with swift, I realized what we wanted was nearly impossible with swift so I switched to Objective C and learned a second language.

Zachary Vampola
I created the Android application using Android Studio, and worked closely with my teammates on having the application interact with the database. I also assisted in the development of the initial idea for our project, such as how it would interact with users and incorporate features that would appeal to a wider audience.

Amy Topka