VendCred

Connect People with Vending Machines from Wherever They are!

Inspiration

Finding your favorite snacks be it late at night or during a study session from vending machines can be a hit or a miss, we made an application that resolves that and more.

What it does

It is a mobile application that finds vending machines near you with your favorite snacks and helps you earn rewards. It also allows businesses to track inventory, get alerts on issues and restock popular snacks.

How we built it

We built the app using software like Antigravity, Figma, Node.js and Copilot. The programming languages we used for our code are Python, node.js and SQLite for building the customer-business database system.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the alert system to work for sending notifications to the businesses on which vending machines have low stock, no stock or are broken.

Setting the map location to be on-campus in East Lansing Michigan rather than New York City.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a working application that is practical and solves a problem. Building a two-way solution for the customer side and the business side. We are also quite proud of being able to accomplish a great UI design.

What we learned

We learned about Antigravity and how it helps in designing web apps more efficiently. We learned that businesses can incur significant loss from vending machines if they are not setup in busy locations or if they are tampered, to make sure to set up an alert system for that and track performance for businesses.

What's next for VendCred

Since this is a working application with a tangible business idea, the next goal would be to scale this so that it is available to people not on only MSU on-campus but other campuses across the country.

Making significant improvements to our application such as adding more metrics to track performance of the vending machines in the business dashboard as well as improving our maps setup and more.