SafeArrival

Icon for the bot

Inspiration

As college students, we know that staying on campus can be unsafe. The purpose of this bot is to generate an appropriate alert system to ensure the safety of individuals as they leave their homes/dorms and travel elsewhere for short periods of time.

What It Does

Individuals input the amount of time they will leave for (in minutes), and the bot will check-in to see if they have arrived when the time comes. If they have not arrived five minutes after the given time, then the bot will ping a higher role to indicate that the user is missing.

How We Built It & Challenges We Ran Into

Since we are all beginner hackers and most familiar with Java, we built the bot in Java. There were many challenges we ran into since Java is not the most efficient language to program a Discord bot. There were JDA-specific problems because some of the resources we utilized were outdated. We had to learn a lot about JDA (Java Discord API) to figure out what we should use in order to program our bot. Since we were all working on it at the same time, the commands got messed up at times and we had to individually go in our individual computer systems to clear the cache.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Since none of us had prior experience with Discord bots or using an API, it was really rewarding to see our bot come together. It was also nice to see everyone working together even when doing everything virtually. In the beginning, we underestimated the difficulty of making a Discord bot, but we ran into many challenges along the way, so it was awesome to see how it all played out in the end.

What We Learned

Through this project, we learned a lot about the Discord API. We also learned about teamwork since we had to do everything virtually. We learned to efficiently divide tasks so everyone had something to do and we finish the project in time.

What's Next For Us

There are some features we would like to add, such as extending the time if a student is not coming back home yet. After polishing the bot, it would be nice to figure out hosting methods to have the bot branch out to other servers and be used by other people.