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Home Page
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Search Page (Searched for Greasy Pizza Box)
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About us
Inspiration
As first years at UC Davis one thing we noticed is the school's aim for being green. All throughout the town, all garbage cans on and off campus have specific bins for recycling, landfill, and compost. When throwing away trash, more often than not, trash is mixed and incorrectly placed in the wrong bins. Many factors contribute to this, but we found that the main issues are simply just people either being too lazy to do it properly, or not knowing where specific trash goes. To combat one of these issues, we created an app that will help teach people how to properly dispose of trash.
What it does
BinBuddy works by asking for a user's input for an item they are trying to throw away, and outputs an environmentally friendly response of what type of trash bin they should throw it in and why, so that the user can learn.
How we built it
We built it using a Gemini AI API in order to generate an AI response for the user. We fed the AI with a specific question outline where the user’s input is filled in for the type of item they were throwing away.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into many challenges, but our first challenge was taking a pivot in our initial idea for the app. At first, we wanted to utilize a static database and have users pick a trash item from there, but we ended up going with a Gemini AI ChatBot instead. Fortunately for us though, this was a worthwhile change in the end as we were able to give our app a more flexible answer format. Another challenge that we ran into was implementing the actual AI, as this was our first time implementing such a feature in any project. We also had some issues with React Native, as we weren't able to fully display our app in IOS until about halfway through which meant we had to reformat all of the pages we worked on.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to complete an entire app in time, despite the fact that this is our first hackathon. None of us had ever created an app independently, so it was really awesome to see us come to together with limited experience and create an app. Alongside this, we implemented and used many technologies that we were unfamiliar, while maintaining a simple yet solid functionality.
What we learned
Throughout this Hackathon, we learned the importance of mapping out a flow chart of what needs to be done. It was much easier to visualize the project ahead of us when we a clear plan and possible challenges. We also learned the valuable lesson of communication, as being able to clearly communicate with each other greatly increased our productivity and overall work environment.
What's next for BinBuddy
We hope to add many features to BinBuddy, which include but are not limited to image recognition, an account and friend system, past searches, and possibly a trash bin/hazardous waste disposal location map.
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