Hack the North GO

Inspiration

One of us loved Pokemon GO, and the other had never played it. We decided to make our own adventure and spark social interactions throughout the hackathon

What it does

Hack the North GO is a revolutionary app allowing new, complex interactions throughout hackathon members. By scanning other hacker's name tags and learning about each other, you build your HackerDex on a journey to top the leaderboards and catch 'em all and become the very best, like no one ever was!

How we built it

We used Intellij-IDEA to write an Android client targeting Lollipop (and later) devices along with the zbar QR Code API for scanning QR codes.

We used PHP, Firebase, and Microsoft Azure to write a server backend to handle authentication and handle all communication between the Firebase database and the Android clients

Challenges we ran into

We initially wanted to write the app in Xamarin C# to target iOS, Android, and Windows devices, however, after several hours of failed setups and mistakes, we decided to target just Android devices in native Java.

While setting up Firebase, we discovered an opensource PHP API for creating simple Firebase POST requests, however, after several hours of debugging, we wrote our own after the original failed to work.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Thinking of a kick-ass idea
• Creating our first material design Android app
• Utilizing the otherwise useless lanyards
• Breaking the Firebase usage graph

What we learned

• Firebase
• Azure
• NoSQL
• Xamarin
• Android

What's next for Hack the North GO

Cleaner UI, security upgrades

Built With

• android
• azure
• cloudflare
• firebase
• https
• intellij-idea
• java
• nginx
• php
• post
• qr