Handyman

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Inspiration

Automated machinery such as vending machines, ATMs, DVD rentals, and staffless restaurants are increasing in complexity and becoming more prevalent. Many customers have experienced a lot of complications with these machines -- but reporting it requires a phone call to a clumsy support line, making it difficult to get refunds and incredibly annoying for the customer. Handyman solves this by streamlining the process from a customer experiencing an error to a serviceman fixing it.

What it does

There is a web interface for a customer, which allows instant reporting for any issues they discover. They can provide a description and provide their email for easy refunds. When a customer submits an error, an administrator is notified via email, and they can go to the web dashboard to get started fixing errors.

How we built it

The websites were made using NextJS and TailwindCSS, while the backend scripts use Node/Express, and the data is stored using the sites and catalog APIs from NCR. The two frontend services are hosted on Vercel, and the backend server is hosted on Google Cloud Platform.

Challenges we ran into

NCR API issues: We had trouble updating items in the NCR catalog API, but we reached out to NCR's developers and found quick fixes
Hosting the application: Putting two websites online and one backend server online, and having them all communicate was no easy task, but with the help of mentors we got it done
Security: Using NCR's APIs required complex authentication, and we added extra security in our front end

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The idea
The security
The design

What we learned

A lot. We learned more about NCR APIs than we ever thought we could, and we learned a ton about JavaScript, NextJS, Express, Node, TailwindCSS, and even the Google Maps API in the process.