Android airtime voucher number sender and activator.

Abstract

In Uganda there are number of ways of people use to share airtime on phones which include mobile money, MTN Me2U and using Airtime vouchers. However, these methods have their cons which have led to development of this mobile application to offer alternative to them. The use of airtime vouchers requires one to manually input the long 14-digit long number with USSD codes. But this method is time wasting, tedious and prone to errors. And in case of more than three consecutive errors attempts one is barred from loading airtime using airtime Vouchers for some period of time. In order to solve some of these problems, an application called Voucher up. However, this application is limited in functionality and lacks the ability of facilitating a user to send the voucher number to another user and also activate it in case a user receives it and its accuracy is inconsistent. And also it does not give a user a way to share airtime with another person. This Project was aimed at solving the problem of time wasting that occurs when one manually types the Airtime Voucher numbers into an sms so as to send airtime to another person since the average typing speed of a user is low and the typing process is also prone to typing errors which can lead to the sim card being blocked from airtime recharge in case recharge exceeds three consecutive attempts. This problem was solved by designing and implementing a mobile application that can scan the airtime voucher number and facilitate a user to send to another person as an sms. And when the recipient receives the voucher number, the used recharge is executed by this application through its voucher activator module. The developed android mobile application comprises of camera interface module, image processing module, optical character recognition module, messaging module and the dialling module in its design. The camera interface module is comprises of android camera APIs which are used to draw camera frames on a surface View widget using Jpeg and picture Call-back functions. The image processing module uses both leptonica and Android APIs to implement functions that can translate, scale, gray scale and binarize the captured image. The OCR module was created using Tesseract OCR engine APIs to facilitate character Recognition. The messaging module comprises of the android intents. This module takes the results of the OCR module as an input and requests a user for a contact and sends the message. The dialling module was created from android’s calling APIs and intents and was coded to respond to clicked items of an integer data type and pass it as a variable to the another function especially in Android 4.1 or 4.2 OS versions. In android version of Kikat and Lollipop it uses the android intent for messaging sharing. This module was programmed to dial this statement *130*Voucher Number# where the Voucher Number is the passed variable. All these described modules were integrated into one working mobile application.