PolyEATS

Inspiration

At Team Rocket, we think that the first steps of an intelligent city are to build intelligent schools. Thus, we tackled one of the problems that affect millions of students daily: getting food at school !

What it does

The app allows you to buy food from the different cafeterias at Polytechnique Montreal and get it delivered to you anywhere at school . It also allows you to follow the location of your delivery person and offer you a precise delivery time.

How we built it

We created an Android app using Kotlin and a backend REST server using Rust (for optimal performance under high loads).

For the map display, we used a library called MapBox that we integrated with location fusing to get a precise indoor position using multiple sensors (WiFi, GPS, Accelerometer, Gyro, etc.)

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we ran into is with the backend. Since it was developed in Rust, a low-level systems language, the development effort was quite high.

The second challenge was with Android UI development. Since we had a really precise idea of what our application should look and feel like, we had to do a lot of fine tuning on the offered Android GUI components to achieve a style that fit our vision.

Another challenge was to get an indoors location that is accurate enough to not affect the user experience in a bad way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned a lot! We now know how to write a powerful REST Api using Rust, a language that guarantees memory safety and performance.

We learned how to work with unprecise sensors and output a more precise output using probabilities !

We made a working prototype that is precise enough to give an enjoyable user experience.

What we learned

We knew that planning precise tasks for long-term projects is necessary to be able to deliver a good product. We learned that having the same behaviour, even for really small-term projects, helps tremendously.

What's next for PolyEATS

Adding vending machines so clients can order from any "meal source" at school.
Collaborate with Polytechnique's different cafeterias to obtain a more precise dataset about the meals
Support multiple schools !