DormDash

Inspiration

College students constantly buy, replace, and throw away items every semester. We wanted to reduce campus waste and promote a circular economy. We realized that if we made reselling or giving away an item as effortless as throwing it in the trash, we could drastically cut down on landfill waste while helping students save money.

What it does

DormDash is a sustainable, local campus marketplace. Instead of throwing away a desk lamp or textbook, a student simply snaps a photo of it. Our AI instantly analyzes the image and auto-generates a complete listing. By connecting verified students within the exact same dorms, we remove the friction of travel and make reusing items the easiest option.

How we built it

Our team divided and conquered a full JavaScript stack. We built the frontend with React and Vite, and engineered the backend using Node.js. We integrated Supabase for our database and utilized the Google Gemini 2.5 Flash vision model to process the image uploads and generate structured listing data.

Challenges we ran into

We hit immediate roadblocks with Windows PowerShell blocking our initial environment setups. Beyond that, passing binary image data from a React frontend to an Express backend, and forcing the LLM to return strictly formatted JSON instead of conversational text, required a lot of precise debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of successfully pivoting our tech stack to React and Node to best match the team's strengths under a tight deadline. Seeing the AI perfectly identify an item and instantly create a marketplace card proved that we could successfully use tech to drive sustainable habits.

What we learned

How to efficiently configure a React app and manage state.
The intricacies of handling image uploads between a client and a server.
How to constrain Large Language Models to output strict JSON schemas for a backend pipeline.
Setting up a cloud database on the fly.

What's next for DormDash

To push our sustainability mission even further, we want to add a dedicated "Free/Donation" tier to heavily encourage giving items away. We also plan to build in-app messaging to coordinate pick-ups and expand our location mapping to other university campuses.