Inspiration
We conceived this idea out of trying to address the intense amounts of furniture that are left on the streets of the greater Boston area on September 1st, the concurrent end of all apartment contracts in the area.
Conventionally, only savvy students scavenge the streets. But, connecting people with tables, chairs, and desks benefit not just the person who has 5 desks on their front lawn-BUT ALSO students who have been eating off the floor because they have no furniture. My roommate and I literally had to stand at our desks until we found out there were chairs just outside our apartment.
That's where FreeBee comes in.
What it does
FreeBee allows users to upload their photo into our app and it automatically detects what kind of furniture is within the photo, and then places a marker that is available to the public with all the details. It allows the community to see the map and try to find out what kind of furniture they could potentially collect.
How I built it
FreeBee was built using Flask (Python), and we utilized AWS (Rekognition) and GCP (Geocoding and Maps) API for our web app to function as we wanted to.
Challenges we ran into
We were initially using React with Flask but after trying to combine both frontend and the backend, we realized that they were to an extent incompatible. We also had some trouble working with JS all of the members had minimal experience working with it.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The majority of us were first-timers and interacting with a lot of different new technologies and tools was something that we are really proud of. We also created a final product that we can showcase-- we are especially proud of that!
What we learned
We learned to take advantage of different APIs to provide necessary information to our users. As a lot of the members in our team had never been to a hackathon, we also learned how a whole project is run from frontend to backend to the database aspect!
What's next for FreeBee
We want to add search functionalities so the user can search up specific markers to find specific furniture on the map. We would also want to try potentially use machine learning to detect the quality of the furniture so the user can know if the furniture is reusable or not. We strongly think that FreeBee has a lot of potential to work with extended features!
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