TAStalker

TA Stalker lets you quickly find out if your TA is currently in their office. Getting help on HW never was this easy!

Comment

Inspiration

What it does

The entire point is to link the professor and teaching assistant's mobile devices to IBM Bluelink's node red to track geolocation. Once the location is tracked it will be compared to the location coordinates of the professor's office and if the coordinates of the mobile device are within a reasonable coordinate range within the coordinates of the professor's office a message will be sent to a website that will say the professor or his teaching assistants are in his office. It would be helpful for the students to know exactly when their professors are in their offices and do not have to take time to send emails back and forth to find out.

How I built it

We used node red capabilities to track the coordinate locations of one of our group member's mobile devices and then if the coordinates were in between a certain distance it would say that the teaching assistant or professor was in the office or not. We also built a webpage that we would try to send the message to so many people could see it for practical use.

Challenges I ran into

Bluemix is somewhat experimental right now and there were some problems figuring out how to use it. Once most of the bugs are fixed it should be a fantastic program to use, but it has some slow load times on the servers and there was a point where our node red project was corrupted and our group had to start over.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We start off as 4 total strangers, and we managed to put together a project from scratch to a living service. It's far from perfect, but giving the complexity and different level of knowledge involved, we are proud to say "we learn, we hack we ship and we grow"

What I learned

We had some very extensive exposure with IBM IoT platform over the last 24 hours. We played around with a couple of communicating protocols and different ways for accomplishing the same thing.

What's next for TaStalker

Our outlook would be first to optimize this service for energy consumption. Then we want to try to wrap it up as a stand alone, portable, accessible package, and hoping other TAs/Professors would adopt our solution. Eventually we want to establish our service as a add-on service that could be integrated to systems like outlook or Canopy(Blackboard)

Share this project:

Updates