CMU LinEX

CMU LinEX: Less Waiting, More Living
The CMU LinEX bot
CMU LinEX bot displaying wait-times for open restaurants
Bot starts recording wait-time.
Submission of wait-time to Server.
App home page
Time Submission from the App

Mathias Thomas (mathiast) Micheal Lang (mhlang) Naman Mansukhani (nmansukh) Ryan Kim (rckim)

Inspiration

One of the biggest inconveniences as a college student is to wait in a long line for lunch when you have an assignment due in 2 hours. The inspiration for our project was the mutual dislike of waiting in lines for food.

What it does

CMU LinEX is a source of information for wait times at Dining Locations across CMU. The app and the discord bot give users details about restaurants that are currently open and what their wait-times are.

How we built it

As a first step, we created a back-end API using Flask and MongoDB. We then made an app as a front-end for an API. We also created a Discord bot as an alternate interface to the service.

Challenges we ran into

The first hurdle we ran into was working on the back end: we used the TimeSeries feature from MongoDB 5.0, a feature that was not available to us with cloud hosting.

We ran into some problems while creating the Android, since we decided to use Kotlin, (which was new to us), rather than sticking to Java.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a functioning platform! The front-end and back-end work as expected, and we have a codebase that can serve dining location wait-times to students. We're also proud of coming together as a team, serving something new, and not being sleep-deprived to achieve all of this!

What we learned

While we were familiar with Java, we decided to use Kotlin to make our Android app. This was done as a challenge to honor the spirit of hackathons - learning something new! We also picked up a lot of knowledge working with each other, in domains ranging from making discord bots to getting things working on cloud hosting.

What's next for CMU LinEX

We plan on extending the concept of CMU LinEX to anything here at CMU that has a line, ranging from lines for picking up deliveries to lines for events happening on campus. With this, we hope to save thousands of man-hours per year.