Waitless

Landing page shows real time reviews on all 6 dining locations at Vandy
Detailed look on one of the Dining Options page.

Inspiration

Our project was inspired by the daily inconveniences Vanderbilt students have been experiencing with dining this semester : waiting in line for as long as an hour only to find out that the food is perhaps not so great, or worse, to find out there is no food left. We wanted to fix this frustration by showing students how good the food is, and how many people are in line in real-time.

What it does

Our Web Application provides real time ratings and reviews for 6 main dining halls at Vanderbilt, as well as showing you how many people are in line. We used infrared sensors to record someone entering a line, and the standard Student ID card reader to record someone leaving. The Web Client would apply this change immediately in real-time so students can decide on the best dining option if they are in a rush. Finally, a Web Scraping program fetched all the dining options and daily menus to display on the client.

How we built it

The Web Application was built using MongoDB, Node.js, Express.js, and React. The Student ID card reader and the Arduino Infrared sensor programs were written through Python and PyMongo to interact with the MongoDB database. The Web Scraping program was also written through Python, and communicated with the Backend Server through a JSON file.

Challenges we ran into

Creating the Web Application was the easy part. Interacting with real hardware such as the Student ID Card reader and the Infrared sensor was a huge challenge that our team members worked hard to overcome. Finally, putting all the pieces together caused a lot of headache as the web and hardware programs were written in different languages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud that the interactions with the hardware is represented in real-time on the web. This is where we spent the most time towards the end of the hackathon, and was unsure until the last minute whether this would function properly or not. We are proud to have completed an early version of an MVP.