Tend Your Greens

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Inspiration

How many times have you thrown away spoiled fruits or vegetables? The idea behind this web app is to alert you right before your food is about to expire so that you eat it on time!

What it does

You take a picture of a fruit or vegetable. We identify the fruit or vegetable and check the number of days it lasts and create a calendar event mentioning the expiration date of the food. This way you can know when your vegetables are going to spoil and plan to cook them accordingly.

How we built it

We used the Google Cloud vision API to identify the food and Google App Engine to host our web app. Our app runs using node.js and the blood, sweat, and tears of our developers.

Challenges we ran into

The project had a lot of data processing and we ran into problems converting data from unusable formats to formats that fit our use case. For example when using google cloud vision's RESTful API, we needed to convert the image we grabbed from an input form to a base-64 encoded string that could be passed on to google's API for additional processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the server deployed onto Google App Engine was a really big moment for us because of the difficulty we initially had setting up the server. Also, getting the app to work for both mobile and web environments was challenging, but we managed to get it done. Finally, integrating our app with google calendar with pre-populated data was a big win!

What we learned

After working on this project, we gained a deeper understanding of how client-side requests interact with server-side responses. We discovered the intricacies of how data is sent from one side to the other, and how different data formats can be molded to fit particular needs.

What's next for Tend Your Greens

We are currently planning to add a greater selection of identifiable products by expanding our database. Also we plan to compress images before sending it to the server so sending photos will not take as long.