Food With Friends

Inspiration

With everyone's busy schedules, it can be difficult to plan a lunch with a friend every day. It is all too common to walk into a dining hall and see students eating their meals alone, and end up sitting alone yourself in the one to two hours before your next class. It is awkward, or even rude, to just sit down with a stranger and eat with them. You can't be sure if you will connect with them, or if they even want to talk at all. But what if there was a way to seamlessly find a new lunch partner every day with similar passions at any time?

What it does

Every table in a given dining hall has a small sign on it with the Table's ID and labeled with the FoodWithFriends' url. If the student eating alone at the table wants to participate, they can stand the sign up and visit the web app. On the web app, they simply input their name, table, and an interest they're passionate about. Then, when another student comes looking for a table to eat at and sees various signs up, they can visit the website, view all the available tables and corresponding interests listed, and join any if they so choose. The result is the company of another person during lunch, and a friendly conversation about a subject all participants are passionate about.

How We built it

Web App: Using JavaScript, we were able to make the webpage interactive, allowing users to input data. This data is stored in a tree in a cloud-storage database (Google's Firebase). With JavaScript we traverse the tree and output sorted user data onto the web-page under the appropriate location section. Using HTML, CSS, and HTML5UP, we created the front end of the web-page with a clean, minimalist aesthetic.

Sign: We used SolidWorks to prototype and design the parts. Then, we 3D-Printed the base, laser-cut the head, and lathed the aluminum middle piece.

Challenges we ran into

Hardware: Originally, we wanted the sign to be a device that could connect to our webapp. However, CMU's wifi requires authentication, a layer that the chip we were using, ESP2866, could not get through.

Software: Traversing the data tree proved to be difficult given the various snapshots and specific syntax of Firebase.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a fully functioning version of our initial idea, despite the hardships.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how wifi works, implementing databases, prototyping, and web development.

What's next for Food With Friends

We believe Food With Friends has a lot of potential. For the device on the table, we would want to make it fully autonomous and connected to the web app, such that it could indicate when the student at its table wants to find a lunch partner (with motors and LEDs). We would want the web app to eventually be an IOS and Android app as well. We would also add more features, such as a user sign in that can save interests and connect to social media.