SandCastle

Inspiration

Sandcastle was developed because of a need of localized chat messaging. We are talking to each other using messaging apps more than ever before but sometimes we don’t have the ability to talk to everyone in one location or have a large group chat in one place. Sandcastle solves that.

What it does

Sandcastle creates a localized proximity chat area for users. Users are able to connect to “castles” within a 50-meter radius. Within the radius, users are able to join a public chat (created by a user) or a private chat (when they have the password/link or QR code as a method of authentication) or make their own chat on the spot.

How we built it

Sandcastle was built from the ground up in 24 hours. Some members had an idea and some joined on in the first couple hours. Two coders developed the backend and front-end of the application. One designer designed all of the assets and the wireframes. And one person was solely responsible for the server-side code. It was built on Java using Android-Studio and APIs such as Firebase and Facebook authentication. Designs were done on Illustrator and Sketch using some incredible next level techniques of converting millions of pixels into sick images.

Challenges we ran into

The first 8 hours were filled with challenges. Slow internet (very slow), non-compiling code, and figuring out exactly how to make this work is the tl;dr.

In long we had a lot of difficulties setting up Firebase and Azure. This took nearly the entire first day 12hr for our server guy. The coding was a pain because of all of the parameters in figuring out how to make localized chats work. The design was filled with making everything as intuitive as possible and then re-doing it over and over again.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re honestly proud of getting it done. It was a day filled with zero sleep and lots of food but making a product at the end was the best part.

What we learned

Coders: Android CardViews, Google Maps API, working with nested JSON objects, Android callback features, abstraction in Android, General Project management, UX/UI design, useless bot interfaces Designer: How to design with coders, Android Studio, Atom, HTML & CSS, Bootstrap, Github, XML, Kind of how servers work, github and domain.com (it didn’t work - I learned little) Server Guy: HOW TO DO FIREBASE AND AZURE GODAMMIT KIND OF