Inspiration
In some museums, it's possible to wear a walkman-like device and input codes listed on displays so you can hear more information about that particular object while you see it. We thought it would be cool to have the same process applied to your house or office. By printing out a QR code and placing it next to a particular object, anyone can scan it with their phone and immediately receive a sea of data that you choose to upload: videos, images, audio files, and text descriptions that relate to that physical object and your life.
What it does
It's a website hosted on an Amazon ec2 instance. Users can create an account, log in, and create 'objects'. An object is a physical thing in the real world that you'd like to associate data with, and you can upload mp3, mp4, jpg, png, jpeg, gif, and .txt files through a portal. You can then generate a QR code with an encoded URL that leads visitors to a page preloaded with all of the data you uploaded.
How we built it
First, we registered the domain mymuseum.me. Then, we created a linux instance using Amazon Web Services and configured an Apache server with a mySQL database. We then used PHP and JavaScript to ensure a user logged in correctly, run a user session so they could access and modify all of their data, and upload/display all of their files successfully.
Challenges we ran into
LOTS AND LOTS OF PHP. Neither of us had ever done significant work doing backend duties with PHP and a web server, so the learning curve was rough starting out. Also, once we finished the backend functionality there wasn't enough time or energy to put a lot of work into the frontend polish, so the website looks a bit minimalist and beginner-ish.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Although it may not look super impressive, we learned the ropes of a programming language we'd never used before, a cloud service we'd never worked with, and a field where we were inexperienced but still came out ahead with a completely functional project. mymuseum.me is up and running, and although it's able to be used by users there's still a lot of work to be done.
What we learned
We can accomplish a lot when we put our mind (and nights) to something. Also learned the fundamentals of developing backend and some frontend work for web applications.
What's next for myMuseum
- UI updates, frontend polish
- Security!! This website is susceptible to a plethora of cyberattacks, most notably SQL injection. We didn't have enough time to go through and fix these, but they're very important to get complete to be a functional project.
- Allowing for more file extensions. HTML5 doesn't natively support a number of image and video extensions (looking at you, Apple), and so utilizing an external plugin is going to be necessary to make the upload process easier.
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