“I made hardware that notifies me when slots are available.
All of you know how difficult it has been to find a vaccine slot through the government website owing to how quickly it gets filled up.
People soon realised that the Govt. of India made the API to check vaccine slot availability public and started building all sorts of bots like WhatsApp Bot, telegram bot, twitter bot etc. that sends a notification when vaccine slot is available. And it basically became an unofficial nation-wide hackathon
Me being a hardware enthusiast decided to make a hardware device that notifies me when a slot is available.
I grabbed my favourite microcontroller, ESP8266 and started writing code.
I was not able to call the API directly from ESP8266 so I made a proxy server in node.js that forwards my request.
Initially, I just added an LED that blinks when slots are available at a given district.
Later I added a 2.4 inch TFT LCD that shows information about the vaccine centres as well.
It’s still a fairly simple project that involves only two components,
ESP8266 development board like NodeMCU or WeMos D1 and ILI9341 Display.”