Inspiration
Many students at Berkeley look at the Cal Dining menu to decide which dining hall to go. Often times, we need to search up the contact information of various student services, including Bearwalk and UCPD. However, as we all know, the AirBears2 Wi-Fi network is not the most reliable, and this can lead to frustrating situations when we cannot get access to the information we need because we cannot connect to the Wi-Fi.
What it does
Text our number to receive an instant SMS reply about today's dining hall menu, as well as the hours and phone numbers of various campus student services.
How we built it
We utilized the Twilio API to send and receive text messages and the Beautiful Soup package to parse the Cal dining website and retrieve relevant information. As for the front end, we used HTML, CSS, and Javascript along with Boostrap and JQuery to create the home page.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest difficulty was parsing the Cal dining website because the page was difficult to parse and we were new to the Beautiful Soup package. However, we examined documentation for Beautiful Soup in detail and experimented with its various functionalities. After a night of painful debugging, we were able to produce a dictionary of menu items from the website. In the end, we became a lot more familiar with both the Beautiful Soup package and the Python language in general.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of our sleek-looking home page and being able to successfully parse the Cal dining website. We're also proud to have implemented a service that will provide convenience to fellow Cal students!
What we learned
We became more familiar with Beautiful Soup and the Twilio API. We also learned how to use Flask, Heroku, and GitHub.
What's next for CalDine
We will contact Cal Dining about the possibility of including CalDine as an official feature of the Cal Dining website. We will look for possible sponsors such as Cal Dining.
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