No More Receipt

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In-app QR code scanner

No More Receipt

Why did we choose this project?

In the beginning, our aim was to reduce the use of paper and first and foremost to have a practical way to store and retrieve receipts. During the event however, more facts became known to us about thermal paper used in almost all receipts. For example, the presence of Bisphenol A (BPA) seems to be a big threat to public health and safety. BPA can easily go through the skin, which is a huge problem for cashiers, but not only. We know far too well how microplastics and BPA can negatively impact a whole ecosystem.

How does it work?

The principle is really simple: after you pay at the cash register, you can choose to get your receipt physical as usual, or via our app. If you choose the later, a QR code will be generated for you to scan. After scanning it, you will see the receipt in your app and will be able to access it whenever you want.

How does it really work?

First, the receipt is sent to the server in JSON, a UUID is sent back to the cashier and the receipt is temporarily stored in the server. Then, the QR code is generated, it contains the UUID. When the user scans it, a new request is made to the server with this UUID, and the receipt is retrieved by the user and stored in the database. The user can then access it when they want.

Some of the problems we encountered

The main problem we encountered had to do with our framework. We decided to use a framework based on the Scala programming language, named "Play!". The problem is that there wasn't anyone in the team that had any experience with this framework, so we ended up losing a lot of time on the backend side of this project. We knew that it wasn't going to be easy by using this framework, but we choose to do so to give ourselves a bit of a challenge. In the end, the positive side of this is that we all learned a lot about Scala and the Play! framework, but if we had to do it again, we would probably go with NodeJS or ASP.net

Future

During this event we didn't have time to implement all features we thought about and we stayed on the application basis (Scan QR code and save it into the app). But we had a lot of ideas to improve our app and add some functionalities.

Future features :