Walkie Talkie

Home page
Sign in page with authentication
Request list
add new request
show interest to a request
Chatbox for communicating between people with common destination.
Google map api to navigate the route

Inspiration

This was inspired by the intrinsic awareness of the potential danger around the daily lives of students. Even if the campuses are generally roamed by safety forces and have high volumes of people, dangers usually can come to students to stay up late to study or for personal business, some times it can frightening to have to walk home alone late in the night, that is when it is prone to danger. And that is when Walkie Talkie comes to life.

What it does

It allows students to post their ongoing destinations, and other students (students only) can see a list of nearby requests and choose which one(s) matches closely with their destinations. Walkie-Talkie connects students like that with the hope that students would feel safer and more secure walking in a group and also can make some friends along the way.

How we built it

We built it as a cross-platform mobile application since we thought such an idea would work best for offline mobile devices rather than web applications. many built-in packages and applicable software to give more features for the application, like local and SMS notifications and chatbox. The server-side program is built using NestJs to connect the front end with CockroachDb relational database to store new, temporary data like requests and long-term data like users' info as well. A fun deep neural network model to predict crime rate and crime category at any given time or time slot is built using python, however, the performance was not completely satisfactory and Dagshub was a bit too novel so the project is not reported.

Challenges we ran into

Even when we each had our own specialties and interests, it was hard to make sense of the connection between those interests, and working together was a bit difficult since there were many factors of great gaps. We have some difficulties figuring out the requirements to connect to CockroachDb and customize the server URL so that it can access the authorization of the database. We also spent time figuring out using Geolocator to generate the specific location of the user and how to process the json files so that we can put those information in the back-end.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our ability to learn and the guts to try to learn new knowledge just because we thought those features would be beneficial to the performance of the applications. Some of the things presented were not known before by any of us, so we are proud that we could push it through to make a concrete result with them.

What we learned

We learn the challenges and thrill of working with other people in person, especially people with different interests and specialties. It can be so exciting and scary at the same time, but everything is possible if we are willing to put the time and absolute focus into bringing shapes into the things we found interesting. The most valuable asset we could learn was patience, patience brings the unexpected, so we just have to enjoy the process.

What's next for Walkie Talkie

We have had this idea for a while now and we are really serious about getting the proper feedback on the practicality and usefulness of this product in a real-world setting. We do believe that this idea, even if not novel, can bring some awareness for possible daily danger and hopefully more sense of safety for students, so they can carry out a more fulfilling life not worrying too much about what unexpected danger can happen.