Mayank Govilla

This was my groups' submission for the HACK@WPI 2020 hackathon. Inspired by the lack of social interaction throughout the pandemic, we decided to make an app to allow users to subscribe to groups related to their interests and join queues based on what activities they want to participate in. This can be for finding a quick duo partner in a video game, a small study group for an upcoming test, or a large scale boba run. Goatbook will send notifications to subscribed users when a queue becomes full, and will put all those users into an anonymous chatroom to decide whether they would like to share details and meet up, whether that be in a small group or online.

I've always enjoyed playing puzzle games and Sudoku is one of the best. While learning about P vs NP, I found that the Sudoku problem is classified as NP-complete which was not consistent with my intuition as I was always able to solve the boards without needing to guess and check. So I decided to create a heuristic-based Sudoku solver using the techniques I knew. While trying to randomly generate boards with the algorithm, I found that it worked over 90% of the time, but that last few percent was just not possible no matter what heuristics I added. I realized that the boards that I was solving were created to be solved, and those heuristics are not enough in the general case. At this point, I switched to solving and generating the Sudoku boards with the Dancing Links algorithm. Overall, I learned a lot about backtracking efficiently, heuristics, and data structures through this experience.

My friends and I play a large scale social deception game called Real Time Mafia. In the game, there are 3 teams - the villagers, mafia, and the neutrals. Each player is able to make an action each night based on their role in the game. To make this process smooth, I wrote a bot integrated into our Slack Workspace that can moderate the game. Users were assigned roles and could submit actions each night, and these actions would refer to other players. At the end of the night, the actions would be compiled and sent to the mod team to be resolved. This project was built and deployed through Autocode which runs serverless functions.

Base Chess is a mobile application that allows users to play live chess and set up realtime tournaments. I love playing chess and wanted to build my own app for it based on a beautiful chessboard theme by Deven98. I learned how to make responsive applications in Flutter and integrated a backend using Google Cloud. I used Firebase for authentication for users to login through Google accounts and Cloud Firestore as the database.

After using the Bannerweb site on mobile, I knew I needed a better way to access my schedule on the go. I created a basic mobile application for WPI students to access their schedule from their phones. This app prompts the user for login information and can store it safely on the device, and then uses HTTP requests to get user data from the bannerweb website. Since Bannerweb does not officially expose an API, I devided not to pursue this project further.

This project was to create a 3D scanner using the parts of an old 3D printer. I designed the parts in Solidworks and 3D printed them to form the chassis. The core electronics included the arduino UNO, stepper motor drivers, an SD card reader, and a bluetooth module. These components were controlled using the desktop application that I made in Python.