We all love ASCII art and the joy it brings us. ASCII art has a distinct charm, offering cutesy portrayals of popular characters and celebrities that feel different from other forms of art. But we wanted more—we wanted ASCII art of things that aren’t necessarily mainstream but still deserve to be represented in a fun and loving way. Our project allows us to shine a light on subjects that rarely get ASCII adaptations, especially given how time-consuming creating ASCII art can be.

Asciinator is a one-of-a-kind text-to-image-to-ASCII generator that brings a spark of ASCII life to any input you desire. All a user has to do is enter a description of the art they’d like, sit back, and watch as their ready-to-copy, beautifully crafted ASCII masterpiece is generated. But the magic doesn’t stop at first sight—our built-in zoom functionality lets users scale the ASCII art effortlessly. With a simple plus and minus button, you can adjust the character size to fit any display size you want!

Our frontend was built with pure HTML/CSS and JS, and our back end was built with Python. We hosted our website with Heroku, and used a free .tech domain, so that we had the luxury of a general server and anyone who wanted to try our finished product could type in a simple domain name. Our back end is built in Python, but we have some different technologies other than Python alone. Our backend connects to Kamiak, so that we can run a Deepseek text-to-image model---LOCALLY, within Kamiak's super computing capabilities. A big advantage of keeping everything local is that we can run our entire tech stack without internet or a dependency on any external services, and even run it all on a single PC if need be.

• Kamiak was a little bit of a learning curve. The workshop was very helpful, but it took some good old-fashioned trial and error to get it running at points.
• Deciding the right imaging API/AI model combination took some time.
• Sleep -- being tired definitely does make it more difficult to think!

• GREAT finished product that we can share with others.
• Having such great teamwork, and being able to work independently, efficiently, and yet as one.

• New tech stack to take home to mom and dad
• Working directly with AI models
• Multiline server requests
• Unbelievably excellent coding principles :)

• Add the ability to connect it to a database of real photos and images such as Pixabay. This would require a bit more fine tuning, but would probably produce more consistent results given a good source of images.
• Convert colored images to colored ASCII art.

• CSS
• HTML
• Janus 7B
• JavaScript
• Kamiak
• Linux
• Python