Recyclable?

Inspiration

We got to Hampshire College and were surprised by how sustainable this campus is: a lot of trees, bicycles, and recycling bins around campus. So we decided to build something related to sustainability.

What it does

You take a picture of any object with your iPhone/iPad, and the app tells you what it is and whether it is recyclable, or should be composted, or recycled in a special way (for bulbs, computers, etc.)

How we built it

We wrote the app in XCode using Swift 2.0, and we used Imagga API to retrieve information about the photo.

Challenges we ran into

We spent the entire night trying to send an image to a server via HTTP POST request. We didn't succeed, so at 6 am we had to switch to another API and everything worked!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed create a simple yet beautiful and powerful, and what's more important - fully functioning app from scratch for less than 24 hours, despite the fact that only one person in the group was somewhat proficient in iOS development.

What we learned

Go sleep if you're stuck in code for longer than an hour.

What's next for Recyclable?

More intelligent image recognition system, possibly by combining the results of multiple APIs. A more precise list of what is and what is not recyclable.