Inspiration
As college students, sometimes we need items that we do not necessarily want to buy, since we will not use them forever. For example, if we want to borrow an iClicker, we would have to ask in many groupchats to see whether anyone has an iClicker that we could borrow. We wanted to make a system that college students could all use to rent items in a fast, easy, and efficient way.
What it does
RNTL is a system through which college students can post listings for items that they want to rent out and rent items from other people (whose listings are already there) by using the website or app. How it works is that a student would want to rent out their iClicker, for example. The student would fill out a form to post a listing through the website or app with their name, the product name, the product description, and an image of the product. Then, the form would go back to the server, and the server would add the product listing to the main page on the website and app. After that, if another student wanted to rent the iClicker out, they would click a button on the listing on the main page for the iClicker item, and pay the rental fee. This would connect to the physical locker system that RNTL has, and id card of the student who wants to rent the item would unlock the locker with the iClicker item for a certain amount of time, during which the student can use the iClicker, and then put it back before the rental period expires.
How we built it
We built RNTL's website using HTML and CSS. We built the physical locker component of RNTL using Arduino and C++. To build the app for RNTL, we used Android Studio, along with Java and XML.
Challenges we ran into
A major challenge that we ran into was connecting the app and the website to the server. At first, we were not able to send the post listings to the server and update the HTML file for the home page with all the listings, but after researching and troubleshooting our issues with the server, we were able to successfully connect the server to the website.
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