Inspiration
We had members with web development experience, and some with no app development experience. We had a strong motivation to challenge ourselves and build a full app with a frontend and backend. As for our problem, we decided to challenge ourselves to tackle a somewhat mundane task that seeps valuable time away from people's lives to make it fast and accessible: keeping track of expiration dates. And thus, Xpira (our app) was born.
What it does
A mobile app that tracks expiration of multiple products in real time, which helps save time (giving you more time to focus on yourself), utilizes applications like Firebase (which open it up to a wider range of future analytics), and is simple to use.
How we built it
We built this project using Machine learning, Firebase, and Android studio. The machine learning section was used for the barcode scanner, and the Firebase was used as our app’s back-end. Android studio was used to compile it all together into a functional mobile app.
Challenges we ran into
Getting started was difficult, but we met with one of the mentors, Ayushi Panth, and she provided us with a direction to start. From then on we used a wide range of resources: youtube tutorials, coding blogs, the Android developer & Firebase tutorials, etc. There were some difficulties in getting the Barcode API up and running, because we figured out there are certain barcode types that don’t work well with the API, therefore we only have some certain barcode types that work. We also had to make sure that the user was able to use both input options (expiration date vs package date and months till expiration), and we encountered some difficulties with those.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We learned app-dev in 24 hours. We also learned a lot of new technologies in the process, such as Firebase, Google’s Barcode API.
What we learned
We learned so much from this project- it was a great experience and we gained knowledge about topics such as app development, machine learning implementations, Firebase back-end, and more.
What's next for Xpira
There are currently 30 major barcode formats that are commonly used today- and our next steps would be to add additional functionalities so the app is able to recognise all of them. Currently the barcode scanner can access approximately 5.
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