LendIt

Lend and Borrow items with trust. IOT smart locker system.

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Inspiration

It’s Friday afternoon, and as you return from your final class of the day cutting through the trailing winds of the Bay, you suddenly remember the Saturday trek you had planned with your friends. Equipment-less and desperate you race down to a nearby sports store and fish out $$$, not realising that the kid living two floors above you has the same equipment collecting dust. While this hypothetical may be based on real-life events, we see thousands of students and people alike impulsively spending money on goods that would eventually end up in their storage lockers. This cycle of buy-store-collect dust inspired us to develop Lendit this product aims to stagnate the growing waste economy and generate passive income for the users on the platform.

What it does

A peer-to-peer lending and borrowing platform that allows users to generate passive income from the goods and garments collecting dust in the garage.

How we built it

Our Smart Lockers are built with RaspberryPi3 (64bit, 1GB RAM, ARM-64) microcontrollers and are connected to our app through interfacing with Google's Firebase. The locker also uses Facial Recognition powered by OpenCV and object detection with Google's Cloud Vision API.

For our App, we've used Flutter/ Dart and interfaced with Firebase. To ensure trust - which is core to borrowing and lending, we've experimented with Ripple's API to create an Escrow system.

Challenges we ran into

We learned that building a hardware hack can be quite challenging and can leave you with a few bald patches on your head. With no hardware equipment, half our team spent the first few hours running around the hotel and even the streets to arrange stepper motors and Micro-HDMI wires. In fact, we even borrowed another team's 3-D print to build the latch for our locker!

On the Flutter/ Dart side, we were sceptical about how the interfacing with Firebase and Raspberry Pi would work. Our App Developer previously worked with only Web Apps with SQL databases. However, NoSQL works a little differently and doesn't have a robust referential system. Therefore writing Queries for our Read Operations was tricky.

With the core tech of the project relying heavily on the Google Cloud Platform, we had to resolve to unconventional methods to utilize its capabilities with an internet that played Russian roulette.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The project has various hardware and software components like raspberry pi, Flutter, XRP Ledger Escrow, and Firebase, which all have their own independent frameworks. Integrating all of them together and making an end-to-end automated system for the users, is the biggest accomplishment we are proud of.

What's next for LendIt

We believe that LendIt can be more than just a hackathon project. Over the course of the hackathon, we discussed the idea with friends and fellow participants and gained a pretty good Proof of Concept giving us the confidence that we can do a city-wide launch of the project in the near future. In order to see these ambitions come to life, we would have to improve our Object Detection and Facial Recognition models. From cardboard, we would like to see our lockers carved in metal at every corner of this city. As we continue to grow our skills as programmers we believe our product Lendit will grow with it. We would be honoured if we can contribute in any way to reduce the growing waste economy.

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