Boiler Book Listings

Boiler Books Listings helps Purdue students find and buy textbooks fast. Upload your UniTime schedule, and using OCR, get required books, and connect with peers to buy or sell.

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Inspiration

As Purdue students, we’ve all faced the same problem: buying and selling textbooks is frustrating, time-consuming, and expensive. From navigating UniTime schedules to hunting for cheaper book listings, the process often feels harder than the classes themselves. We wanted to simplify that experience and build something tailored for students, by students.

What We Learned

Through this project, we learned how to:

  • Integrate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract CRNs directly from UniTime schedule screenshots.
  • Use web scraping and APIs to match CRNs with textbooks.
  • Build a Next.js + Firebase web app with a clean UI using Tailwind CSS.
  • Apply collaborative workflows with GitHub and agile iteration during a hackathon setting.

How We Built It

  • OCR: Used Genkit + Google ML Kit for extracting CRNs.
  • Textbook Lookup: Queried Purdue’s adoption search.
  • Marketplace: Designed a listing system where students can post and browse used textbooks.
  • Stack: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Firebase, Tailwind CSS.

Challenges

  • Parsing CRNs accurately from noisy screenshots.
  • Handling incomplete or messy OCR output using regex.
  • Connecting schedule data to textbook listings reliably.
  • Building a marketplace backend on a tight hackathon timeline.

Reflection

This project showed us how technical solutions can save students time and money, and how much can be accomplished with teamwork under pressure.

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