Inspiration
What inspired us to create LifeBud was the popular Japanese kid's game, Tomogatchi. It allowed kids to take care of their little pets by feeding, bathing, and taking them on walks. The life and health of the pet are similar to a real one, where it is dependent on you. I remember when I was younger always checking on my Tomogatchi pet, and I wished to channel that motivation into more productive things, which helped us create the BudLife. The mission of the app is to provide a simple yet fun platform for users to directly see their success in an instant! The BudLife pet is shown to you in the beginning, along with an introduction. You have the option to customize it, and make it your own! You are then given the responsibility to care and feed for your new friend. The way to earn money to clean and bathe the friend is by completing tasks. The health of the pet will also deteriorate over time since it will get dirty and will require food. By having a system to where your success directly correlates to something you are motivated to care for, it will give users a further push to finish that To-do List, in order to see their pet thrive! Additionally, in order for you to make sure you don't forget about your tasks or your pet, we have a built-in alarm system that will send text messages to alert you with reminders.
How we built it
We built it on Pycharm using Kivy which is a library and language that facilitates app design. Everything from username, password, money, health, and tasks is all saved onto a database API called airtable. By doing so, each user will have their pet remembered and retrieved from the database. We also used Twilio API to help send the text message alarms to users as well.
Challenges we ran into
We had to learn how to use APIs for the first time in order to use the texting feature that our app uses. We also had to enhance our python skills, as we were still on a basic level on how to use python. Most of our time, we were taught how to use java as our first programming language, like how we had to find out how to call methods from other classes, and the relationships between children and parent classes/objects. In addition to all of this, we had to learn how to use databases in order to make our login work. accomplishments that we're proud of - We are proud of making the app work and having it look so neatly designed as well. We are also proud that we figured out how to make the database work.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of making the app work, and having it look so neatly designed as well. We are also proud that we figured out how to make the database work. Also, we are proud of the alarm system that we created. We also learned how to use Kivy for the first time, which was challenging. We picked up a lot of stuff through dozens of Kivy tutorial videos and referenced the documentation so that we could program more key apps in the future with more ease, as we could be considered kivy experts at this point. This was also the first hackathon ever that we completed, so we are quite proud of that too.
What we learned
In addition to what we stated about our use of databases and APIs, We improved our python skills overall and learned how to use the Kivy language in order to build the app. We also learned how to use the PyCharmintegrated development environment as well.
What's next for Life Buddy
We would like to add a feature where there is also a habit tracker. If the user would like to add certain habits that can show up on their to-do list every day it would be a simple reminder for them to complete it for that day, On another screen, there would also be a display of how many days your habit has been maintained and the more the user keeps up the streak, the more money they will earn for their pet. We would also like to add a store to buy specialized food or clothing, and maybe include the option of adding a name for the pet to help users create a closer attachment with them.
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