Categories

Best Health Hack, Best Mobile Hack, Best Pebble Hack, Best Use of Twilio

Inspiration

Sipper is a drink counting app that helps a person maintain their optimal buzz. The novel part of the app is that, since the person going out for drinks might not reliably count their drinks themselves, the app enlists the help of the bartender and a friend.

How it works

TL;DR. The bartender scans a QR code on your phone when she pours your drink. If you drink too much, the app texts a friend.

To start, the bar- or party-goer enters his weight and gender, then gets a unique QR code on his phone. When he gets something to drink, the bartender can quickly scan his QR code. Sipper keeps a running tally of the bar-goer’s estimated blood alcohol content (BAC), based on the entered weight and gender. If it gets too high, Sipper shoots a text to a trusted friend to keep him in the loop.

There are two views to the app: one for bar-goers and one for bartenders. The bar-goer view consists of a big QR code and a drink meter. The drink meter displays the user’s estimated BAC. The bartender’s view consists of a menu screen, where the bartender can select the drink he or she is serving, and a QR code scanner.

The app uses Firebase to sync information between the bartender and the bar-goer. We used Twilio to automatically send texts to a friend when a user’s BAC gets too high. In addition, we created a Pebble watch face that displays the bar-goer’s QR code, to provide easy access to the code throughout the night.

Challenges we ran into

We initially planned to integrate our app with Pebble, as a companion iOS app; however, this proved more challenging than we initially expected. We couldn’t find many examples of sending images straight from a companion app to the Pebble, so we had to settle for a workaround that takes a user’s ID using the Settings feature in the Pebble Smartwatch app then sends a QR code to be displayed on the smartwatch.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We’re proud of the fact that we were able to adapt quickly to the technologies that we used for this app. iOS, Twilio, Firebase, and Pebble were all new to us, and yet we believe we picked up the information quite rapidly. Within the short span of this hackathon, the team was able to successfully integrate these technologies into our main application that is demo-presentable. Additionally, we have a starting proof of concept for many of our future extensions. Each of us on the team feel a sense of achievement from expanding our full-stack knowledge and capabilities by at least a tiny bit.

What we learned

On the other hand, we have learned how much more we can accomplish with previous familiarity with technologies. For instance, for some of our team members, mobile development would have proceeded much quicker if they stayed within their comfort zones of Android. Although, Swift feels much nicer and easier to read than Objective C, there were some restrictive roadblocks, especially periodic background task computation.

Nevertheless, it was a pleasure for all of us to hack in this positive environment where seeing others hack late into the night inspires us to stay up and keep hacking. We’re grateful to the judges for taking an interest in our project and providing great feedback. Of course, we would like to thank all of the BrickHack organizers and helpers who made this event possible.

What's next for Sipper

  • Further integration with Pebble
  • iOS Health app integration and stats
  • Venmo / Square / Apple Pay
  • Sign-ins (Facebook, Google, etc.)
  • Add QR codes to Passbook

Appendix

The GitHub repo for the Pebble part of this app is located here.

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