BoilerEat

Do you know what to have dinner for tonight? With BoilerEat, no more stress deciding which place to eat. Just allow us to have your location. Then, we give you restaurant near you. Bye Stress!

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BoilerMake '22

     
   

⛏️ must-install programs!

Terminal

npm install
npm install axios
npm install react-native-paper
npm install @react-navigation/native @react-navigation/native-stack
expo install @expo-google-fonts/inter expo-font expo-app-loading

💻 About Our Project

Inspiration

As a student, it is rare to walk into a home with a meal prepared. With busy schedules and assignments going out for meals became more often than eating in. However, every day it is a struggle to choose which restaurant to go to. I cannot know all the possible restaurants I can go to for certain types of food near my area. Therefore we decided to come up with a service where a user will get restaurant recommendations based on the current location. This will at least let students not be stressed over deciding where to go after class out of many more stresses they have.

What it does

Boiler Eat will take in current location through GPS or an address manually typed to search restaurants near the user. The recommendation will be based on the type of food and the radius the user wants. After the user was recommended with a first restaurant and is not happy with it, the user can ask for another recommendation by simply clicking the "hammer" button. Boiler Eat will keep giving new recommendations until there are no more restaurants.

How we built it

We used JavaScript for the backend React-Native and Expo for the frontend. Using Google Places APIs we were able to get information about restaurants based on the location of a user. We asked the user to select a radius, type of food, and provide a location before giving a recommendation. Based on the input of the user, we searched for the restaurant using Google Nearby Search API. We returned the name, address, phone number, open status, and distance from the user to the restaurant by walking and driving to the user. We had a color theme of lavender with more white color in it.

Challenges we ran into

Since it was our first time using Google Places APIs, we faced the challenge of saving the results into a string value. We needed to save returning values into a string in order to present it on Boiler Eat. However, it did not work as we desired.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the design of our app Boiler Eat we built from a scratch through Expo and React Native. Every step in building this app, we had to choose the color and shape of every icon and text box. It was tough to be precise with the location of every icon to be even but we were able to do it. Moreover, JavaScript as a Backend with Google Maps API and React Native & Expo as Frontend were incompatible, causing revamps, and mistakes were commonplace. It made us go through a new concept about Protocol Calls and LocalHost using Express. Also, how we worked through our challenge of trying to link the backend and frontend is also a huge part to be proud of. It took us the most time to figure out and fix it. This was our first time using APIs so we had to go through a lot of trials and failures. We never gave up and worked until the last minute. We are most proud of our persistence to accomplish with Boiler Eat.

What we learned

From BoilerMake 2022 we were able to learn a bunch of meaningful lessons. Most importantly we learned the hardships of backend programmers. It was very different from the projects that were done in classes. This was the first time using APIs and Geolocation. We had to teach ourselves how to use APIs to obtain information. Also, using Geolocation was very interesting. Converting a textual address into latitude and longitude was something we have never done before. We learned that if we try and put in a lot of effort while being excited, everything is possible to do. We were able to finish the Boiler Eat project with enjoyment since we were excited about our own project even though it was hard.

What's next for BoilerEat

We would want to expand further from here and return more information about a restaurant to the user. Also, it will be fun if we can give menu, reviews, and delivery options of a restaurant in the future with Boiler Eat. This project has so much potential to become better.

💁🏻 Our Team,

👨‍💻 Seung Heon Lee

Full Stack Developer

Purdue University, Undergrad. Senior majoring in Computer Science

Skills

- C, C++, C#, Python, Java, React, React Native
- Git, Figma, Firebase, TensorFlow, Pytorch

👩‍💻 Jihyun Pyun

Full Stack Developer

Purdue University, BS + MS. Senior majoring in Computer Science

Skills

    - Python, Java, C, C++, Javascript, HTML, CSS, React, React Native
    - Tensorflow, Firebase, Git

👩‍💻 Yejoo Ahn

Backend Developer

Purdue University, Undergrad. Junior majoring in Computer Science - Data Science

Skills

    - Java, C, Python, R, RStudio, JavaScript
    - MySQL, Git

👨‍💻 Junseok Oh

Backend Developer

Purdue University, Undergrad. Sophomore majoring in Computer Science

Skills

    - Java, C, PHP, JavaScript, HTML
    - MySQL, Git
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