Stall door

Inspiration

Yik yak used to be half-decent on campus, but a series of net-negative updates kind of led people to stop using it.

On the other hand, despite efforts some might describe as 'what?' by the campus, people still seem to like drawing on the walls and doors of bathroom stalls on the quad. Given that this was sort of like the original yik yak, I wanted to draw inspiration from the idiom of how people communicate writing on the door of a bathroom stall.

I've also always thought that it's silly when location-based social media sends you data out of your local area to the cloud, the NSA, etc. when two people message each other on, say, hangouts, across from each other in a lecture hall, that message bounces way farther than it needs to in order to get to the other person. As a result, I wanted to leverage a local connection to store data and interface with the app. In the same way that one can only read/write on a stall door while in the stall, I wanted a user to need to be close to a "door" server in order to use the app. To this end, I wanted to implement a wifi-direct connection between a small server (think raspberry) and an android app.

What it does

Nothing, really. Unfortunately, I really couldn't have managed my time more poorly, and at the moment the "demo" app displays a read-only first screen of what the app could look like.

How I built it

Very slowly over the course of the last 18 hours of the hackathon.

Challenges I ran into

Having never written network code before, or written an android app before, I knew I had a lot to learn going into the hackathon. However, I ultimately couldn't accomplish many of my goals due to technical failures, janky design patterns, and some long yak shaving.