Inspiration
Have you ever got lost in the Airport? Where is my gate? Am I waiting at the Terminal? Where can I rent a car? These and even more questions describe a problem of many people who don't travel by plane a lot. Every airport is similar, but they are all totally different when you are under stress and need to find the shortest way to your gate, shop or car-renting office. We want to help all the pleople with this kind of problem, so we've built navigation system and mobile app for passengers. And what about to allow passenger to use their boarding pass to buy whatever he wants and after his flight he can use Bank Application (for example OTP Bank app) to pay for services (renting a car, e.g.) or deads.
What it does
Our navigation system uses Bluetooth triangulation based on Raspberry Pi beacons placed on strategic places creating a grid or a map of position of the passengers using our application. Our Android application is searching for advertising data from beacons and calculate where a passenger is located and based on his information (retreived from boarding pass or from manually entered information) we can show him where he is supposed to go and which way is the shortes. We allow him to buy deads in the shops or to use any service and he will pay using his temporary account fixed to his boarding pass.
How we built it
We have used Raspberry Pi and Python code to advertise any information as a Bluetooth Beacon. Location of all beacons is calculated and stored in an airport system and we share airport map with all users. We have used Xamarin and have written a code in C# and the product is application with user login, QR code reading, retreiving and commiting data to MSSQL databese. Second part of mobile application is written in Java using Android SDK and Android-Beacon-Scanner code.
Challenges we ran into
Retreiving data from QR code is definitely not so easy as we thought. It took more then 12 hours. Another challenge was to deploy and start bluetooth driver for Raspberry Pi correctly and deploy beacon advertising program. Very interesting problem was also with MSSQL database connection on Raspberry Pi.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Both of these challenges were succesfully accomplished, so we are tired, but happy what we did in last 24 hours. System measuring position of cell phone using bluetooth proximity is very interesting and much more accurete that we thought - we are not using just RSSI (received signal strength indicator) of Bluetooth, but we are creating hexagonal and triangle maps to find out where passenger is located and if he is walking where he wants to go.
What we learned
It was enormously educational, because we have learnt a lot about Android apps development and we have resolved so many tiny but extremely time-consuming problems with a huge impact on our project
What's next for Don't Get Lost
We would like to add possibility to rent a car, search for a flight and manage whole process of travelling by plane using our system. We wanted also to switch from MSSQL to AWS Database.
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