jWakeup

Inspiration

One day, we had a GenMath midterm. As I arrived there, I looked all over the class, and my friend, Frasineanu, wasn't there!... Fast forward 6 hours later, a sad guy, with wet hair, and raspy voice asked me for a cigarette. It was my friend. Apparently, he overslept because the phone didn't wake him up. But then I thought - we can make calls to our landline phones in our rooms! They will call you, and call you, until you answer. If you answer, you will get a math question to wake you up. Thus, the solution was found.

What it does

It is a server to call your room at any desired hours, insist if you don't answer and also ask you questions. Also, the user will be able to delete/add alarms. This is useful iff the landline phone is away from the bed.

How I built it

We used Go because of it's simplicity with concurrent functions (goroutines). The HTTP server communicates with the SIP client-server. Thus, we can add logged users (using our campus' campusnet credentials/api) into a list, check their token, add calls to a list. Also, it implements XML reading and writing into a file in case the SIP client-server crashes. The SIP server will also send to the client (jWakeup) DTMF tones which will represent the answer given by the called person.

Challenges I ran into

Securing go-channels, writing cookies (I still have to figure out what I have been doing wrong), actually reading some RFC files from top to bottom to learn some protocols, debugging UDP traffic.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Writing something extensive in a such period of time - multitasking, server communication, learning protocols.

What I learned

To prepare extensively before any task, and the fact that the start is one of the most important elements. Also, to get technical - SIP protocol, SDP protocol, RTP, DTMF tones, how to properly use gochannels, basic website structure.

What's next for jWakeup

Actually make it work. I will make it a service available in our campus, which will actually call our rooms (SIPp was used for server emulating), with question-asking, and answering. People to whom we've talked were very happy about the idea, and many agreed that they would like to see it implemented in the campus.