Inspiration 💡

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Second World War. Already, thousands of lives have been lost, and millions of livelihoods have been disrupted through displacement, lost homes, and lost incomes. Everyone all over the world is shocked by the unfolding humanitarian tragedy and the consequences of this brutal war. Damage and destruction to medical facilities as well as a shortage of service providers and critical supplies have also severely compromised the delivery of essential health services. With a limited supply of food and essential medical care, it’s important for the people of Ukraine to stay connected and help each other out in these hard times.

Unikrane is a small effort that aims at uniting the people of Ukraine. ✨

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What it does 🤔

The primary goal of Unikrane is to connect every Ukrainian in need and provide help to each other with a Secure, Fast & Reliable manner. We were motivated by the spirit of Ukrainian, the perseverant attitude allows them to achieve great things, knowing that we have the loving support of those around us.

How we built it ⚙️

First and foremost, it is Crafted with 💙. The whole process can be broken into the following points :-

Flutter as the Mobile-app framework.
NextJS wrapped on React as the front-end framework and Tailwind as the CSS bootstrap framework.

Google Colabs were run to train the image compression model, which was initially written in Python language.
Distribution Relay via PeerJS with Axios to log the internet speed in this project.
Postman was used to test the custom created peerJS server api's. Later on we moved on to the default integration methods.
Google Translate API for seamless interface content translation.
IPinfo API to fetch the appromixate location from the Public IP.
TFJS for client-side image compression.
Cloudflare Edge as gateway for wrapping Proxy Sessions.
Nginx as reverse proxy.
NodeJS for Backend runtime.
Vercel's Serverless Functions for Underlying deployment.
GitHub's CI/CD

Design 🎨

We were heavily inspired by the revised version of Double Diamond design process, which not only includes visual design, but a full-fledged research cycle in which you must discover and define your problem before tackling your solution & then finally deploy it.

Double-Diamond

Discover: a deep dive into the problem we are trying to solve.

Define: synthesizing the information from the discovery phase into a problem definition.

Develop: think up solutions to the problem.

Deliver: pick the best solution and build that.

Moreover, we utilized design tools like Figma, Photoshop & Illustrator to prototype our designs before doing any coding. Through this, we are able to get iterative feedback so that we spend less time re-writing code.

Research 📚

Research is the key to empathizing with users: we found our specific user group early and that paves the way for our whole project. Here are a few of the resources that were helpful to us —

CREDITS

Design Resources : Freepik
Icons : Icons8, fontawesome
Font : Poppins / Roboto / Raleway

Challenges we ran into 😤

We faced some challenges during the hackathon, many of which ironically related to working remotely. One of the major challenges was the time difference. All of us participated from different time zones, which created communication challenges. We started pretty late, probably on 14th July, 2022, which actually brought some serious brainstorming and then executing thoughts into action!

Gathering Data: This was by far the most tiresome work that we all invested in our time in. We did extensive research while collecting data from various sources & also verified if they're copyright free or not.
Custom Widgets — Transforming highly dynamic mockups created in Figma into Flutter Widgets and Layouts.
Preparing the ML model: We had to optimize the image by compressing it on the client side itself & doing that with TFJS was a critical task.
Integration of Modules - Connecting the Various APIs, SDK’s and JSON data with front-end UI Components was challenging!
CORS Err — No cap, nothing but the devil inside every good things :p

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✨

We are proud of finishing the project on time which seemed like a tough task as we started working on it quite late due to other commitments. We were also able to add most of the features that we envisioned for the app during ideation. Moreover, we learned a lot about core CS fundamentals, Computer Networks, Web technologies and libraries that we could incorporate into our project to meet our unique needs. And as always, working overnight was pretty fun! :)

This project was especially an achievement for us because the experience was very different than in-person hackathons. We found that some parts were the same though - we went through heavy brainstorming and extensive research all to feel the sweet, sweet success of hitting the final pin on the board.

Scalability & Market Viability 📈

We crafted this app under 2 days with extensive efforts. We believe this can be a proof-of-concept but it still requires some time to get ready for production so that it can be nationally adopted by various Humanitarian Agencies, Governments, & every Ukranian individual in need. We plan to refine the app by making it more accessible and then launching the beta version of the app for testing/feedback. After this, we will launch our app on AppStore and playstore for public use. We also plan to open source this project and allow others to contribute to it so that as a community we can deliver the most reliable and useful app for Ukrainians.

What we learned 🙌

Proper sleep is very important! :p Well, a lot of things, both summed up in technical & non-technical sides. Also not to mention, we enhanced our googling and Stackoverflow searching skills during the hackathon :)

team

We are a team of 3 [2 Female + 1 Male] driven by innovation. What we create during our Hackathons is just the tip of the iceberg and we believe this project can help Ukranians uplift the communication lags faced everyday by providing a Safe, Fast & Reliable connection in this time of despair.

What's next for Unikrane 🚀

We believe that our App has great potential. We just really want this project to have a positive impact on people's lives! We would love to make it more scalable & cross-platform so that the user interaction increases to a great extent. Additionally, we intend to continue improving the image compression algorithms & adding receipts to track conversations for later use.

Note ⚠️ — API credentials have been revoked. If you want to run the same on your local, use your own credentials.

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