Commutr

A socio-engagement platform and transit app acting as a companion to Toronto's TTC subway system.

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Inspiration

Toronto is famous because it is tied for the second longest average commute time of any city (96 minutes, both ways). People love to complain about the TTC and many people have legitimate reasons for avoiding public transit. With our app, we hope to change this. Our aim is to change the public's perspective of transit in Toronto by creating a more engaging and connected experience.

What it does

We built an iOS app that transforms the subway experience. We display important information to subway riders, such as ETA, current/next station, as well as information about events and points of interest in Toronto. In addition, we allow people to connect by participating in a local chat and multiplayer games.

We have small web servers running on ESP8266 micro-controllers that will be implemented in TTC subway cars. These micro-controllers create a LAN (Local Area Network) Intranet and allow commuters to connect with each other on the local network using our app. The ESP8266 micro-controllers also connect to the internet when available and can send data to Microsoft Azure.

How we built it

The front end of our app is built using Swift for iOS devices, however, all devices can connect to the network and an Android app is planned for the future. The live chat section was built with JavaScript. The back end is built using C++ on the ESP8266 micro-controller, while a Python script handles the interactions with Azure. The ESP8266 micro-controller runs in both access point (AP) and station (STA) modes, and is fitted with a button that can push data to Azure.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the WebView to render properly on the iOS app was tricky. There was a good amount of tinkering with configuration due to the page being served over http on a local area network (LAN).

Our ESP8266 Micro-controller is a very nifty device, but such a low cost device comes with strict development rules. The RAM and flash size were puny and special care was needed to be taken to ensure a stable foundation. This meant only being able to use vanilla JS (no Jquery, too big) and keeping code as optimized as possible. We built the live chat room with XHR and Ajax, as opposed to using a websocket, which is more ideal.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our UI design. We think that our app looks pretty dope!

We're also happy of being able to integrate many different features into our project. We had to learn about communication between many different tech layers.

We managed to design a live chat room that can handle multiple users at once and run it on a micro-controller with 80KiB of RAM. All the code on the micro-controller was designed to be as lightweight as possible, as we only had 500KB in total flash storage.

What we learned

We learned how to code as lightly as possible with the tight restrictions of the chip. We also learned how to start and deploy on Azure, as well as how to interface between our micro-controller and the cloud.

What's next for Commutr

There is a lot of additional functionality that we can add, things like: Presto integration, geolocation, and an emergency alert system.

In order to host and serve larger images, the ESP8266' measly 500KB of storage is planning on being upgraded with an SD card module that can increase storage into the gigabytes. Using this, we can plan to bring fully fledged WiFi connectivity to Toronto's underground railway.

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