EcoSnap

Ever wondered in which bin to throw your trash in? Well, we got the answer for you. Simply open the app, point the camera at the piece of trash, take a picture, and we'll tell you where to throw it!

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Inspiration

My teammate and I grew up in Bolivia, where recycling has not taken much of a hold in society unfortunately. As such, once we moved to the US and had to deal with properly throwing away the trash to the corresponding bin, we were a bit lost sometimes on how to determine which bin to use. What better way to solve this problem than creating an app that will do it for us?

What it does

By opening EcoSnap, you can take a picture of a piece of trash using the front camera, after which the image will be processed by a machine learning algorithm that will classify the primary object and give the user an estimate of the confidence percentage and in which bin the trash should go to.

How we built it

We decided to use Flutter to make EcoSnap because of its ability to run on multiple platforms with only one main source file. Furthermore, we also really liked its "Hot Reload" feature which allowed us to see the changes in our app instantly. After creating the basic UI and implementing image capturing capabilities, we connected to Google's Cloud Vision and OpenAI's GPT APIs. With this done, we fed Vision the image that was captured, which then returned its classification. Then, we fed this output to GPT, which told us which bin we should put it in. Once all of this information was acquired, a new screen propped up informing the user of the relevant information!

Challenges we ran into

Given this was our first hackathon and we did not come into it with an initial idea, we spent a lot of time deciding what we should do. After coming up with the idea and deciding on using Flutter, we had to learn from 0 how to use it as well as Dart, which took also a long time. Afterwards, we had issue implementing multiple pages in our app, acquiring the right information from the APIs, feeding correct state variables, creating a visually-appealing UI, and other lesser issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first app we create, a huge step towards our career in the industry and a nice project we can add to our resume. Our dedication and resilience to keep pushing and absorbing information created an experience we will never forget. It was great to learn Flutter given its extreme flexibility in front-end development. Last but not least, we are proud by our dedication to the end goal of never having to doubt whether the trash we are throwing away is going into the wrong bin.

What we learned

We learned Flutter. We learned Dart. We learned how to implement multiple APIs into one application to provide the user with very relevant information. We learned how to read documentation. We learned how to learn a language quickly.

What's next for EcoSnap

Hopefully, win some prizes at the Hackathon and keep developing the app for an AppStore release over Thanksgiving! Likewise, we were also thinking of connecting a hardware component in the future. Basically, it would be a tiny microprocessor connected to a tiny camera connected to an LED light/display. This hardware would be placed on top of trash bins so that people can know very quickly where to throw their trash!

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