SStrong

We provide Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) services to protect and connect the community!

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Inspiration

The recent mass shooting that took place at Michigan State University has left all of us here in East Lansing feeling shocked and terrified. As responsible and sympathetic students of MSU, we fully understand how challenging this period of time is for everyone. That is the reason why we decided to create SStrong, which stands for Spartans Strong and can serve as a tool for MSU students to connect quickly with their beloved ones and find the quickest way out of the danger zone in case of tragic events.

What it does

  1. Logs the user in and authenticates with Google or Facebook.
  2. Stores the user's data into Firebase.
  3. Displays the user's information on the web after successfully logging in.
  4. Provides real-time and bidirectional messaging between people.
  5. Determines the current location of the user as well as the latitude and longitude.
  6. Visualize a map-like interface.
  7. Figures out the shortest path between two locations using multiple algorithms, including Dijkstra Algorithm, Breadth First Search, Depth First Search, and Greedy Algorithm.
  8. In case of an emergency, the user can choose to send the current location alongside a default warning message to his/her friends via SMS so that they can react timely.

How we built it

Here are the technologies we used for this project:

  1. [Firebase] - Authentication and Database
  2. [HTML], [CSS], [Javascript], [ReactJS], [Bootstrap], [Lodash] - Front-end development
  3. [Google Cloud], [Google API], [Geolocation API], [Direction API]- Determine current location and visualize the map
  4. [Python] - Data preparation and implementing algorithms
  5. [socket.io] - Real-time messaging
  6. [Twilio] - Send emergency messages via SMS
  7. [node.js], [express.js] - Server and package manager
  8. [Git], [GitHub] - Version control and code storage
  9. [OpenStreetMap] - Collect map data as .osm files
  10. [BBBike] - Convert data from .osm files into .geojson files which are easier to modify and extract

Challenges we ran into

New features of frameworks and visualizing algorithms written in Python on ReactJS web application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Finish a meaningful project that is likely to have a positive impact on the local community.
  2. Come up with multiple ways to find the shortest path between two random locations.
  3. Learning a new framework in a very short time.

What we learned

Time management, teamwork, new technology, and the beauty of coding.

What's next for SStrong

Our team is willing to develop faster algorithms for finding the shortest path between two places, and we also aim to stick to our motto "Spartans Stronger when Together"

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