InquisitivePigeons (99)

Inspiration

We love cats. Especially, our friendly stray cats. Which is why some of us have cat food or treats prepared every time we go out juuuust in case we run into any cats. However, you know cats. They act like they're hungry but when you open the can of cat food, they'll sometimes walk away. Now you have a can of open cat food and no cats to be fed.

Hence, we wanted to build a bot that shows who has fed your neighbourhood cats and connects you with those cat feeders, so to ensure that your cat stays fed but not chonky.

What it does

The bot allows you to add a stray cat to our database, and shows you all the stray cats near you. The bot also allows you to add a "feed entry" for a specific cat and view all "feed entries". These feed entries will contain information about when they're fed, and the Telegram username of who fed them, so you can message them and coordinate your feeding times.

How we built it

Telegraf library for the... bot, and Firebase to store information.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we wanted to create a React web app. However, given the time constraint, we switched to Telegram bot. Also, we wanted to include more features, like letting users leave comments (cute ones...!!) on uploaded cat photos. But, we just decided to stick with giving other users the Telegram user names of people who fed the stray cats in their area.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the bot to work. Also, thinking of an idea to submit (boy, did we struggle with this one).

What we learned

For most of us, this was our first time making a Telegram bot and also participating in a hackathon.

What's next for MeowMeow_Bot

One of the biggest features we would like to add in is the reporting feature, where you can flag a certain cat as missing or injured, and also indicate who is currently looking for the missing cat or taking care of the injured cat.