Qte | Devpost

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Inspiration

We noticed that other payment solutions, such as Apple Pay, require unnecessary hardware to process transactions, inconveniencing both vendor and customer. Our solution solves this problem.

What it does

Qte is an app that allows instantaneous money transfers through nothing but QR codes, which means the only hardware that we require is a screen and a camera. Qte allows vendors to create bills in seconds, and customers to pay them in just as much time.

How we built it

Our team divided itself into two groups—one focused on front-end presentation, and the other concerned with back-end functionality. On the back-end ,we used Amazon Web Services as our back-end hosting provider, Express.js and the CapitalOne Nessie API to facilitate monetary management, MongoDB to store information on our user base, with it all powered by Node.js. On the front-end, we built an Android app using Android Studio and zxing. Put together, these two components make up Qte.

Challenges we ran into

Our front-end team ran into difficulties with the Android camera API, but were fortunately able to resolve it. On the back-end, we encountered issues involving HTTP 502 Bad Gateway codes numerous times, which were difficult to diagnose due to the lack of information on each occasion, but we were able to power through and resolve them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having been able to integrate two distinct components, a front-end and back-end, together into a coherent whole in Qte. We found connecting the two parts of our program challenging, but we are proud of having been able to do so. We are also proud of our achievements in utilizing the Android camera API, and creating a fully functional web service that wraps part of the CapitalOne API and also handles all of our data processing.

What we learned

We learned how to use AWS for web hosting on Elastic Beanstalk, about parsing QR codes, and how to mesh the two distinct parts of a program, back- and front-end, while working in teams.

What's next for Qte

Aside from further polishing Qte visually and functionally, we’re going to give users the ability to view their transaction history, add e-mail receipts, add a system for users to opt in to donate a little to humanitarian organizations with each transaction, and much more.