Campus Concierge

Virginia Tech's scattered campus resources in one dashboard: live Blacksburg Transit buses, dining hall hours + menus, and club events — plus a voice-capable AI assistant.

What it does

• Bus — routes operating right now, live vehicle counts, next departures per stop (real BT4U data), and A→B trip planning (Google Maps transit directions).
• Dining — halls with real open/closed status and today's hours (VT hours API), expandable live menus scraped from FoodPro.
• Events — upcoming club/campus events from GobblerConnect (Engage API), with "Free Food" tags and links to sign up.
• Assistant — chat + voice (Web Speech API). With an LLM key it answers free-form questions using live data via tool calling; without one it falls back to keyword routing.

All data is live. Nothing is mocked; when a source is down the API returns 502 and the UI shows an error state — the app never fabricates campus data.

Architecture

frontend/  React 18 + TypeScript + Vite + Tailwind (dashboard UI, port 3000)
backend/   FastAPI (port 8000)
  providers/
    bt.py         Blacksburg Transit — BT4U web service (XML), TTL-cached
    dining.py     FoodPro menus + apps.students.vt.edu hours API
    events.py     GobblerConnect Engage discovery API
    maps.py       Google Directions (transit) via REST
    assistant.py  LLM tool-calling (OpenAI-compatible; default z.ai GLM-4.7-Flash)
    cache.py      stdlib TTL cache

Setup

Prereqs: Python 3.11+, Node 18+.

Backend

cd backend
python -m venv ../.venv
../.venv/Scripts/activate        # Windows
pip install -r requirements.txt
copy env.example .env            # then fill in keys (see below)
python main.py                   # http://localhost:8000 — docs at /docs

Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev                      # http://localhost:3000

Keys (backend/.env)

Var	Needed for	Where
GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY	Trip planning (/api/bus/plan)	Google Cloud Console (Directions + Geocoding)
LLM_API_KEY	Free-form assistant answers	https://z.ai (free tier)
LLM_BASE_URL, LLM_MODEL	Optional overrides	Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (e.g. Gemini)

Bus, dining, and events need no keys.

API

Method	Path	Purpose
GET	/api/bus/routes	Routes operating now
GET	/api/bus/vehicles	Live bus positions
GET	/api/bus/stops/{route}	Stops for a route
GET	/api/bus/departures?stop_code=&route=&n=	Next departures
GET	/api/bus/alerts	Service alerts
POST	/api/bus/plan	{origin, destination} → transit/walking steps
GET	/api/dining	Halls, open status, today's hours
GET	/api/dining/{location_num}/menu	Today's menu (meals → stations → items)
GET	/api/events?days=	Upcoming GobblerConnect events
POST	/api/ask	{query} → assistant {answer, sources}

Notes

• All displayed times are Blacksburg time (America/New_York) regardless of viewer timezone.
• Voice input needs Chrome/Edge + mic permission.
• Off-hours (~11 PM–6 AM ET) the bus card truthfully shows no routes operating.

License

MIT. Built for Virginia Tech students; not affiliated with Virginia Tech, Blacksburg Transit, or Google.