Inspiration
Our inspiration was to create a team-based application for android that allowed for collaboration between students or members of a team. We have used a whiteboard before in a team, and thought it would be cool if different people could draw on one from anywhere they wanted.
What it does
It allows people from multiple android devices to download and draw on the application, and this will write the drawing onto the web based board at http://webboard-bitcamp.herokuapp.com/. We were able to get the website to scale so that the aspect ratio of the device sending the data did not matter. The link shared shows a simple example of a drawing that we were able to create from our smartphones.
How we built it
We used Android Studio and Java, python for the server (heroku), and Javascript for the website. We created the application that would send data points to the server and then the server would send them to the Javascript page, where it would update the drawings. It worked with the two test devices we were able to try out on, and we were able to draw and see each other's drawing on the webpage.
Challenges we ran into
One of the bigger problems we ran into was scaling and sending the amount of data when there was a lot of drawing on the board. We also were not able to get the downloading of the data to work, but all the points from each device showed on the website, just not the individual phones to each other.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to build most of what we set out to build in a pretty short time, and for two of us, it was our first hackathon. It was also able to get data from two different devices, which was pretty cool because we were able to collaborate on the webpage.
What we learned
We learned a lot about what to do and what not to do with sending data over a network and to the server. It took a lot of trial and error to get this working, but it was able to work mostly how we wanted.
What's next for WebBoard
We would like to keep developing this application and possibly get it to be able to build to scale, but right now we don't have a full application that is ready for deployment. It works on just the two devices, but we would need to find a way to have many devices post to a different webpage, and we would most likely need to get a non-free version of the software we were using. Ideally, we will continue this project and deploy it on the android market so that people can collaborate with each other on any projects they are working on.
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