Brickapedia

Repurposing Lego sets, brick by brick.

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Inspiration

Our friend (who is a Lego enthusiast) has too many Legos and not enough money to buy more. We wanted to create a solution where she could use her current Legos to make new sets.

What it does

Our site takes an inputted Lego Set ID and outputs other sets that you could make with the pieces in the set you inputted.

How we built it

We started by planning our wireframe on paper, and used Canva to design the background of the website. We used the Rebrickable API to get information about all official Lego sets and their pieces. We used Flask and integrated it with HTML, CSS, and Javascript to take the piece IDs from the set IDs and compare them across all other Lego sets.

Challenges we ran into

Riya - First time using HTML/CSS. Struggled with learning the languages and formatting images to make sure they were placed appropriately on the website. Anisha - I had never used Flask before, or done any backend coding in general, so it was very daunting at first, but I slowly figured it out. It was hard to create an algorithm where you could input a set ID, and get other sets using the same pieces out, since the API didn't have a direct command to do that. Getting the API to output data correctly was also a challenge, as well as getting the backend code to work with the front end code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Lego hand cursor (took a lot of time for a small detail, but it was so worth it!)
  • Getting the API to work
  • Cute Lego minifigures in the Team page
  • Completing our first full stack project!

What we learned

We learned how to use different softwares and languages and getting them to work together! We also learned how to use various online resources effectively to help us while hacking. We learned how to resolve Merge Conflicts and found a balance between updating front end and back end development without causing issues.

What's next for Brickapedia

Fixing some small bugs (formatting issues, repeated sets in search results, 404 errors), improving our design (adding more Lego brick elements, making the page more user-friendly), having the ability to input more than one set ID, and being able to scan pieces (identifying them with computer vision to find the piece ID), adding a login function to save pieces and sets that the user may want to build.

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