←back to thread

439 points david927 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.351s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
Show context
middayc ◴[] No.44421111[source]
This weekend, my modified Android/mobile Point of Sale (POS) app was used to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our village's volunteer firefighting organization.

The standard fiscal POS app was adapted to support a sort of low-trust swarm of waiters who used the app to collect orders. These orders were then transferred to a few high-trust cashiers by scanning QR codes generated on the waiters' apps.

After receiving payments, the cashiers' apps printed invoices and multiple "order tickets" categorized by "food," "drinks", "sweets"... This allowed waiters to retrieve items and deliver them to customers.

The system was used by around 40 users, with new waiters joining or leaving throughout the event. They used their own phones, and the app functioned without internet or Wi-Fi, gracefully downgraded (If a waiter didn't use the app due by choice or due to technical problems, they could manually relay orders to cashiers), Customers also had the option to approach cashiers directly, receive their order tickets, and pick up items themselves.

This is not that technically interesting, but I liked how the old manual system, the 70+ year village firefighting org. main cashier had, got digitalized in non-centralized way. (and I took this chance in trying to explain it, as I will have to, to maybe find more users for it)

replies(2): >>44423008 #>>44431821 #
gwbas1c ◴[] No.44423008[source]
> and the app functioned without internet or Wi-Fi

Just curious: How did it work without internet or wifi? Did it do something over bluetooth, NFC, QR code...?

replies(2): >>44423397 #>>44425190 #
1. middayc ◴[] No.44425190[source]
The waiters (many, low-trust) were transferring orders to cashiers (few, high trust) by showing them QR code that transferred data to the cashiers' apps.

Then the waiter paid the cashier (in advance), got the bill to give to customer and order tickers (printed on a bluetooth POS printer with a cutter, so they were already separated) to recieve the goods (grouped by stations that gave out the goods, food, drinks ...). The stations took the order tickets and gave them goods. The waiters delivered them to customers and used the bill to get cash from the customer.

The waiters could use their own starting money and just stop selling at any point, or got it from the main cashier and had to return the same amount at the end.