Pointme

Inspiration

We wanted to improve safety of individuals in venues such as the Big House here in Ann Arbor, and often times it is easy to be separated from the people that you want to be with. The largest difficulty is that in these situations there is often little to no cellular or wifi connection.

What it does

Our project is supposed to be a tool to use for when you and your friends are out and in places where you could potentially get split up in such as a concert, sports event, or social venue, our project could be used as a way to find each other once you get split up from your friends.

How we built it

Using android-studio with the flutter plugin and flutter blue plus plugin, we were able to deploy our application to phones.

Challenges we ran into

We had difficulties with security protocols, BLE use on smartphones, and developing for iOS devices.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned a framework that was entirely new to us, as well as a Bluetooth protocol that was also entirely new to us. We are also proud that we were able to deploy our MVP and develop a plan for future progress.

What we learned

We learned how to develop a flutter application using dart that implements Bluetooth Low Energy. Additionally, we learned that a security feature exists where smartphones randomly generate and broadcast different MAC addresses than their given hardware address.

What's next for Pointme

One of the things we would like to do is expand the range of devices that our project is able to point you to such as headphones, speakers, mice etc, and even potentially find things like wallets.