Washer World

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  logo

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  landing page

Inspiration

In our household groupchat, almost 20% of all messages sent in a week are asking about the status of the washing machine. This is a problem we believed we could solve using Twilio and a simple Flask app.

What it does

Washer World lets you see the status of all washers in a given laundry room and report them as broken to an administrator. Just text the number and let everyone else in your house, apartment, or dorm know that your washer is taken.

How we built it

the core of the software is a flask application. We use cockroachDB for database management and Twilio for sending and receiving sms messages. The webpage is html generated using jinja and styled with bootstrap.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up the domain proved to be an insurmountable challenge. Although the site is up it can only be accessed via the IP address at time of writing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The dynamically generated webages for the washers took a lot of effort. Because some members of out team are SQL challenged we also wrote a set of python bindings for common cockroachDB queries.

What we learned

Linking Flask apps with Jinja is complicated

What's next for Washer World

Ideally we would add a hardware component, some kind of vibration sensor that would update the state of a washing machine automatically and turn Washer World into a much more reliable record.

Built With

• bootstrap
• cockroachdb
• flask
• sql
• twilio