Chircuit Check

ChircuitCheck is a chrome extension that evaluates the sustainability of a product or service, helping consumers make conscious decisions about the impact of their purchases.

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Inspiration

Our project was inspired by the lack of sustainability data on the impact of day to day purchases to the environment that are readily available to the consumer. We understood just how many people were unaware of the impact of their purchases and knew that our project should work to provide consumers with that information to allow them to make conscious sustainable choices.

What it does

Chircuit Check uses lightweight analysis to scrape important details from product/service articles and utilizes artificial intelligence to generate an in-depth report regarding the product and its sustainability: complimented by a judging score from 1-5.

How we built it

We used design platforms (Figma, Canva, etc.) to storyboard our idea into a tangible product. We had engineer and designer delegations that worked promptly on different aspects of our project (front-end, design, pitch, etc.) to realize our plan to fruition.

On the technical side, we used various web development technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) and manifest formatting to create our Chromium-based extension. Behind our aesthetic design is an intricate backend hosted using Express.js and Node.js. We used Gemini API calls under prompt engineering to optimize our model for sustainability.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into was when we decided to change our project completely and abandon our first idea. We felt our original project wasn't unique enough and didn't feel like something we were passionate about, so we made the difficult decision to change it, even though we were already hours into the hackathon. Another challenge we ran into was two of our member not being able to code. We ended up going with a project that focused solely on coding, so those two members had to use all available tools to learn how to code in order to contribute more to the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning how to create a chrome extension, creating an ai chatbot and dealing with tedious graphic design jobs were all accomplishments that we are extremely proud of. All of these things were new and foreign ideas to us and took a lot of work and time to accomplish. We spent many hours overcoming challenges and solving problems and ended up having to stay up all night in order to finish what we started.

What we learned

This was an intense, fun, and extremely rewarding experience. Although our team is very much still green when it comes to hackathons and development, everybody on our team interchangeably learnt valuable skills when it came to both design and software.

What's next for Chircuit Check

Chircuit Check is very well still in its infancy, however we believe we're just getting started.

We plan on...

  • Upgrading and improving our front-end presentation
  • Harnessing server-side hosting to offer a domain-based platform and centralized API calls
  • Refining Firebase integration to allow for graph visualization from product history data
  • Creating a 'Chircuit' pet that levels up from ecological usage and curiosity on your browser
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