My first week of college involved meeting lots and lots of new people. Exchanging contact information with everyone was a pain. The only quick way to exchange a means of communication was Snapchat; Snapchat has a QR code that can be scanned to quickly send a friend request to another person. That got me thinking "if only there were something this simple for exchanging phone numbers."
QR Connect is a quick way of exchanging contact information with others. Simply select what information you want to share and then generate a QR code with the push of a button. Another person can scan the QR code in the app, and it will create a new contact with the person's shared information
The Kivy package in Python streamlined the entire GUI. As for handling the QR codes, the qrcode Python package was used.
The Kivy package for GUIs almost has its own language built-in, so there was a learning curve with it. Also, the API for integrating the app directly with an API for Android devices was written in Java, so had I done more research into packages I could use for the project before beginning the code, I would have written it entirely in Java instead of Python. Using the camera to scan a QR code and show it on the screen is difficult; Kivy seems to be somewhat ill-equipt to work with live camera footage, and it also doesn't help that I can't get live camera footage in the first place without connecting it to the Android API
The GUI was surprisingly fun to create and figure out from scratch. I would love to make it look a bit nicer, but for something developed in less than 24 hours, I think it looks pretty nice.
GUIs can be a bit harder to develop than I expected; I think I completely lucked out that Kivy exists and I found it. It simplified tons of the code for me, which gave me lots of extra time to figure out how to use and integrate the QR codes
I have two main things on my mind for continuing this project:
- Investigating the QR code generation. Currently, it seems that the QR code is always the same when the generate button is pressed. I want to be sure if this is a bug or not, and if it is, then I need to fix it
- Properly implementing QR code scanning
- Connecting the app to the Android API to actually make the app capable of what I set out to have it do. As it stands, this is more of a proof of concept than a finished app, as a few main features are either missing or potentially bugged.
