CoThings - A realtime counter for shared things

Hello,

I’ve started an open source project that helps us to avoid crowded areas if you live in a community, like a shared house or guest house, during COVID-19 pandemic.

It accounts for current number of people using shared areas or utilities in realtime. It uses Elixir + Phoenix’s Socket for realtime communication.

Currently there’s an only a web app and you need to update the counter manually. However, there’s our iOS application that we’re developing (and needs more contributors) to connect beacons and count the room usages automatically. GitHub - CoThings-App/ios: CoThings's iOS application. CoThings is a realtime counter for shared things.

Project’s website: https://cothings.app/

GitHub Repos:

Any contributions or feedbacks are welcome!

Here’s a screenshot from the web app’s homepage. We’re currently using it in our share-house.

Thank you all!

PS: This is copy / paste post from Reddit that I’ve shared in case you came cross there don’t surprise :slight_smile:

https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/gipy9w/cothings_is_a_realtime_counter_for_shared_things/

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Now, we have an IRC channel (cothings) on freenode.net

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Hey Guys!

Wanna help? Grab an issue :rocket: https://github.com/rainlab-inc/cothings/issues

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Now we have demo web application: Please check it out! https://cothings.app/demo/

Hi Folks!

What do you think about a global version of CoThings? It will be location based. People can manually update a place’s congestion more like:

  • Empty
  • A few people
  • Moderate
  • Busy
  • Overcapacity
  • etc.

instead of exact count.

People can see congestion of any place in realtime, anywhere in the world, mostly around their location, the city or the neighborhoods they live without exposing their privacy.

People can create places publicly, and set the status of the place like above.

With last updated time information people can judge about a place and then decide to go or not.

No tracking nor exposing user location to anywhere, anyone.

Or optionally user can let the app automatically detect the location to increase / decrease the counters while visiting places.

The reason for the Global is, there’re people that want to use the application but not all of them are engineer to run a server. So, instead of struggling with marketing etc to sell it as SaaS, I prefer to do it globally as a social responsibility project.

What do you think about this idea? Do you think it would be useful for people, will they use it?

Any problem or privacy issue, or user right violation can be a problem in the future that I don’t see it now?

I want to believe that people won’t abuse the service, writing script, playing with the counters, trying hacking. Am I too optimistic even for this kind of project which suppose to help people during this pandemic.

Let me hear you! Thanks in advance!