BarcodeBytes

Scanning a Mars Bar
List of foods has tons of items!!!
our chefs are cooking up a goated recipe for you
recipe complete with your weird ingredients

Inspiration

As college students and adults, it's hard to admit that some of us aren't all great cooks (us included!!). 🙀🙀 But BarcodeBytes is meant to be a simple and effective solution for you to make sense of what to do with your ingredients! 😼😼

What it does

With this app, you simply scan the barcodes of random foods lying around (yes, even that can of mystery beans you've had since freshman year). From there, BarcodeBytes will whip up a recipe from whatever bizarre combination of ingredients you have. Ramen, ketchup, a banana? No problem—BarcodeBytes’s got you covered with a gourmet (kinda) meal. Say goodbye to sad dorm room dinners and hello to culinary chaos!

How we built it

BarcodeBytes is primarily a React.js app, with a Python backend. We used a library responsible for recognizing barcodes and QR codes fast and accurately and then utilized a web scraper to gather information from these barcodes about the corresponding food item. We then crafted prompts suited to our needs for this app and fed these prompts to OpenAI, who gives us the final result of your meals.

Challenges we ran into

We had troubles with scanning at first, with many libraries and solutions being unable to scan QR codes accurately. However, we came across a library which worked for us in Python and fortunately had a fork in JS, which was ultimately what our application used. Tying our entire application together with so many moving pieces was also a challenge, but a rewarding one given the result.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Both as a group and as individuals, this was our first project utilizing AI and web scraping both. We are super pleased with the efficacy of our project and the speed at which we completed our project this year. Overall, we made fast progress and were able to quickly learn how to use these new technologies. Within our application, we even managed to make several applications which give a full immersive experience to the users.

What we learned

As a team, we strengthened our skills in front-end development with React.js, as well as our styling skills. We experimented with many new libraries this hackathon, as well as took a much more creative approach to how we wanted to present our application with all of our animations and some sound effects. Given that this application also connects to many external sources as well, we gained lots of experience with new tools too.

What's next for BarcodeBytes

Being able to deploy this to our own domain would be something of interest and could take BarcodeBytes from a hackathon project to an app that people would actually use. It's built for flexibility between host systems so essentially every device with a camera and access to the internet can use it. It would be awesome if BarcodeBytes could take an entire set of food and analyze it at once, but this would take lots more trial and error.