Lion Share

Inspiration

The Lion Launchpad Inventory System challenge appealed to us greatly because it allowed us to create a project which would directly benefit people in our community. One of our teammates,Greg, also found it particularly appealing since the Lion Launchpad community is reminiscent of the community he's part of at the co.space. After touring the makerspace, we were blown away by the atmosphere they had and wanted to create a tool which could help facilitate the borrowing of communal property without restricting it.

What it does

Lion Share provides a simple system to keep track of borrowed items in a shared space. It allows users to see who currently has checked out items and even take on support responsibilities by "adopting" an item. Items also have associated QR codes which can be scanned to quickly find an item in the app. The system is designed to be expanded in many ways including smart assistant integration and machine learning powered image recognition.

How we built it

We used a backend server built on Express.js along with a MySQL database hosted on Google's cloud platform. For the frontend we used Vue, a fast and easy-to-learn JavaScript framework.

Challenges we ran into

We initially planned to build out Alexa support overnight, but the learning curve proved to be surprisingly high when combined with learning a new programming language. In addition, there were some hurdles integrating the frontend code with the backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how intimately familiar we became with our audience's needs and how much we used this information to influence how we built our project.

What we learned

We learned a good deal about developing and deploying on cloud platforms using Google's App Engine and Cloud SQL.

Built With

• axios
• cloud-my-sql
• express.js
• google-app-engine
• javascript
• node.js
• typescript