robotech2022 Justin Ayiih, Kristian Chappell, Tahsin Nabi

Each year when I travel to Bangladesh I get old phones from family and friends to redistribute to friends back home. The phones which would otherwise sit unused in drawers or end up in a trash somewhere see use. The first laptop I bought refurbished failed twice on me. After I opened it up to see what was wrong, I realized that the parts that failed were all third party parts that did not originally ship with the computer. I wished then that I had known more about the repair history of the laptop.

AFK (Accountability, Frugality, Knowledge) is a application which allows consumers and repair shops to log their devices repairs to allow for more transparency and incentivize consumers to purchase or sell more of their used devices. For consumers to use, the application is free though we hope to offer a paid version with business analytics and eBay and Amazon API integration for refurbish and repair stores. In addition to this, it directly links consumers to the documentation they need to repair their own devices they purchase or browse.

We used GitHub to document our design process , Figma to create a working mockup, and java initially to create our first prototype.

We ran into difficulty trying to determine the logistics of the pitch. Specifically how to incentivize consumers to tell the truth when registering devices. We initially tried to implement a database with a javafx application and while we were unsuccessful, our mistakes taught us how to setup the database and connect at a basic level.

We are proud of our mockup and the depth of our solution. We think that it has a real use as a product we ourselves would actually use. This is something that I can see many other companies adopting.

We learned about the business aspect of pitching, risk analysis, profitable business models, as well as basic database management with Python.

In the future we hope to expand our infrastructure for other high value items which create waste. We could try to work directly with first-party refurbishing centers, though this would be difficult as it acts against their interests to sell more devices. We also want to expand our documentation of each device, maybe we could include videos of people replacing the parts or helpful tips for certain devices. It is very common for people removing the screens and keyboard on laptops to accidentally rip the ribbon cables, so if consumers were notified of how to properly remove it for their model it could prevent this.