LaundroMate

Inspiration

The typical college experience often involves the dark side known as the laundry room. From the anxiety of not knowing if there are any available washing machines to the interpersonal conflicts that result from individuals' interests in cleaning their clothes, doing laundry is always full of uncertainty. We created LaundroMate to solve this, displaying everything users want to know and everything users need to know for a smooth experience in the simple task of getting clean clothes, so no one will have to drag their dirty clothes to the laundry room just to see there are no washing machines available.

What it does

LaundroMate gives residents full access to information regarding whether there are machines available. Before going to do laundry, the user can see if there is an available washing machine. If so, they can set the machine to occupied for their estimated amount of time. Furthermore, because cleaning clothes is a necessity and is performed often, we felt that it was important to inform individuals of the amount of pollution, for example wastewater, that they may generate to help them develop better habits and increase awareness.

How we built it

Using Nextjs and Reactjs frameworks, we constructed this web-based application primarily with Typescript. Supabase and Google Cloud were used for data storage and user authentication, which connects the user interface, backend data, and inidividuals components together.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing a Google-based authentication system was a challenge. As a gateway between the sign-in page to the contents page, the authentication system based in pre-existing technology required a lot of adapting and research from us. Without getting this piece to work, the entire project would fall apart, so we must work as a team and invest significant amounts of resources in overcoming this challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to get our Google authentication working through hard work. It took us hours of research, trial and error, and debugging to finally get all the components to align properly and function harmoniously. Being able to persevere through this challenge while also working on and finish the other pieces of our app was really satisfying in the end.

What we learned

Some of us on the team had little to no experience with web development before this hackathon. Through this project, we experimented on, broke, and ultimately built a web app in its entirety. This taught us how to build a front end, link components together with statefulness, link these components with a backend, and store data in a database where data can then be accessed and modified. Additionally, we got to work together as a team, learning how to divide up tasks in an efficient manner while still being able to stay on the same page and understand what's going on.

What's next for LaundroMate

We hope to expand LaundroMate to more communal settings, such as other universities, apartment complexes, and more. We want to reduce these everyday stresses by as much as we can by streamlining our daily lives. There is also potential for data-processing algorithms that highlight the highest and lowest traffic times to do laundry. Additionally, we hope to increase our carbon impact tracking (such as incorporating detergent usage, specific cycles, etc.) so that people can have better ideas on how doing their laundry impacts the climate, allowing them to make small but meaningful changes.